Google and Microsoft team up to combat false positives
Posted by: Timothy Weaver on 02/11/2015 09:27 AM
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Google has teamed up with Microsoft to combat the problem of false positives in the antivirus industry.
We all know what can happen when an anti-virus program flags a system file. Google lists some more of the consequences:
• Software developers may face strong business impact as a large portion of their users see their programs rendered unusable
• Support teams for the affected programs may be suddenly overwhelmed by user emails claiming that the given software is not working correctly.
• End-users may be unable to interact with important software and see themselves unable to finish critical tasks.
• Antivirus vendors’ reputation may be severely hindered.
The "trusted source" project comes from VirusTotal, an online scanning service Google acquired in September 2012 with the promise that it would continue to operate independently. The project made this statement:
We have been working on this for just one week and with just one company, Microsoft, yet results look very promising: over 6000 false positives have been fixed. We would like to extend a big thank you to the Microsoft team for sharing metadata about its software collection and to the antivirus industry as a whole for the false positives remediation.
The goal is for the antivirus vendor to correct the false positive before it can cause any (or further) damage.
We all know what can happen when an anti-virus program flags a system file. Google lists some more of the consequences:
• Software developers may face strong business impact as a large portion of their users see their programs rendered unusable
• Support teams for the affected programs may be suddenly overwhelmed by user emails claiming that the given software is not working correctly.
• End-users may be unable to interact with important software and see themselves unable to finish critical tasks.
• Antivirus vendors’ reputation may be severely hindered.
The "trusted source" project comes from VirusTotal, an online scanning service Google acquired in September 2012 with the promise that it would continue to operate independently. The project made this statement:
We have been working on this for just one week and with just one company, Microsoft, yet results look very promising: over 6000 false positives have been fixed. We would like to extend a big thank you to the Microsoft team for sharing metadata about its software collection and to the antivirus industry as a whole for the false positives remediation.
The goal is for the antivirus vendor to correct the false positive before it can cause any (or further) damage.
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