Have you ever installed an app and suddenly have your anti-virus software popup informing you that it detected something malicious, despite the fact that you know there’s nothing wrong with it? After all sometimes some apps aren’t whitelisted and sometimes their behavior might seem suspicious.
Thankfully Google and Microsoft are planning to do something about it as they have announced (via VentureBeat) the “Trusted Source” project, a project which will focus on addressing false positives in the anti-virus industry. As it stands, Google is currently working with Microsoft to help minimize these false positives in Windows.
How this will work is developers will share their files in a catalog for whitelisting, and vendors can be contacted when their anti-virus software picks up on these files by mistake. This is a bigger deal than something might think because false positives can impact the confidence users have in a program.
It will also overwhelm support teams who might have other more pressing issues to attend than to address false positives, and end-users themselves might not be able to complete their task due them thinking that the software they have installed could contain malicious code even when it doesn’t. According to VirusTotal, over 6,000 false positives have since been caught and addressed in Windows alone, so we can only imagine how many more there are out there.
Filed in . Read more about Google, Malware, Microsoft and Security.