NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

Re:NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities by weinzierl on Saturday April 06, 2019 @01:50PM (#19592005)

I used these for years. Especially the Windows handles checker I found incredibly useful.

That being said: When I recently recommended it to a friend he complained about virus scanner warnings. When we ran the tool through Virus Total we had a considerable amount of warnings and these were not only from the heuristic checkers.

I have considerable trust in Nirsoft and maybe these warnings are wrong but on the other hand I have confidence in Virus Total too.

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Re:NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities by narag on Saturday April 06, 2019 @02:10PM (#19592145)

I've seen virus alerts for programs that I have written and compiled myself so many times that I don't trust antivirus by default. There are a number of API calls that trigger the alerts without further consideration.

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Re:NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities by andrew3726 on Saturday April 06, 2019 @02:11PM (#19592151)

They have a section on their Website about the AV issues.

https://blog.nirsoft.net/category/antivirus-issues/

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Re:NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities by weinzierl on Sunday April 07, 2019 @02:52AM (#19595215)

Thanks, I never came across that.

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Re:NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities by Doubl on Sunday April 07, 2019 @06:34AM (#19595968)

Just learned on his blog that Google owns virustotal. Which is fine I suppose

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Re:NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities by rasz on Saturday April 06, 2019 @02:17PM (#19592186)

Tools are so good malware started bundling it instead of re implementing functionality = virus scanners equal tool presence with malware, lazy.

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Re:NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities by da_chicken on Saturday April 06, 2019 @02:33PM (#19592256)

Yup. Happened with SlimFTPd all the time around 2006 or so. Good tools that are easy to work with and very small get picked up by malicious actors very easily.

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Re:NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities by josteink on Saturday April 06, 2019 @04:31PM (#19592848)

> When we ran the tool through Virus Total we had a considerable amount of warnings and these were not only from the heuristic checkers.

To be fair most anti-virus has a massive false-positive rate.

I’ve had my own software, built from clean source with no fishy dependencies, flagged for whatever reason.

My trust in AV-tech is about zero.

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