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antivirus update (#300)
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thezoggy authored Jan 6, 2024
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Expand Up @@ -234,12 +234,15 @@ <h2 id="toc27">How do I upgrade SABnzbd to a new version?</h2>

<h2 id="virusscanners">Virus scanners and false positives with new SABnzbd releases</h2>
<p>
In the first one or two weeks after a new SABnzbd release, a virus scanner (like Windows Defender) might say the new SABnzbd release contains a virus or that it's malicious.
The reason for this is that SABnzbd is written in the programming langauge Python, but many malicious programs are <em>also</em> written in Python.
Just because of that virus scanners are triggered automatically after a new release, as the SABnzbd binary is unknown to them.<br>
These results are false-positives. <br>
You can upload the SABnzbd binary yourself to <a href="https://www.virustotal.com/" target="_blank">www.virustotal.com</a>, which checks the binary
against all available virus scanners. If the binary did contain some virus, all the scanners would be triggered. Usually, it's just a few false-positives.<br>
Within the first few weeks after a new SABnzbd release, a virus scanner (like Windows Defender/Avast/McAfee) might say the new SABnzbd release contains a virus or that it's malicious. These results are <b>false-positives</b>.<br>
If your antivirus has quarantined/removed SABnzbd or a provided utilities, you would need to restore/release it from your antivirus quarantine after you have updated your antivirus application. If you are having problems you can try re-installing SABnzbd again to restore missing files.<br>
<br>
SABnzbd triggers plenty of antivirus red flags: Packing/executable compression, multiple executables inside, lots of network connections, a listening socket/web interface, scheduler, database stuff.
AV makers may give their products fancy names loaded with buzzwords, "smart-this", "cloud-that", "AI" and so on but under all that varnish is still just a bunch of 'best guess' scoring mechanisms.
Thus false positives remain until they add a manual override for the stuff they get enough complaints about, or enough time passes and their algorithms catch up.<br>
<br>
You can upload the SABnzbd binary yourself to <a href="https://www.virustotal.com/" target="_blank">www.virustotal.com</a>, which checks the binary against all available virus scanners.
If the binary did contain some virus, all the scanners would be triggered. Usually, it's just a few false-positives due to lack of reputation of seeing the release before.
After one or two weeks, most virus scanners are updated and will no longer react to SABnzbd.
</p>

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