Overzealous AntiVirus Programs.
How the hell much work do you have to do in order to keep over-zealous antivirus programs from deleting your old virus/spyware samples, saved evidence, cracks for old abandonware you’ve been hanging onto since high school, and harmless nuisance/prank programs? I suppose I could zip them, then RAR them (replace these with never-heard-of-it proprietary compression schemes that the A/V might not be able to open), then tar them all together, triple-DES the result and rename it to ‘.txt’, but should this really be necessary?
So, no active viruses on my machine, but the latest AVG update just nuked:
- my entire collection of spyware and dialers, zipped/RARed and renamed to harmless extensions;
- malware samples inside an ancient-version-of-netscape mail spool inside a zip file;
- my entire Specimens directory (cexx.org’s malware archives, also pre-safed of course);
- entire directories of files saved from exploits / hack attacks (including files with names like buy-cialis.html)
- a RARed backup of my Thunderbird profile
- misc. password recovery tools
- NewDotNet‘s uninstallers
- an entire Inbox.
Also, apparently it thinks my Trance Vibe netdemo is a Trojan Horse, just like many other programs built using old versions of Borland C/C++ compilers.
I think this AV’s getting nuked if it doesn’t come up with an option to bloody ask me first before hard-deleting files.
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