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Virus or trojans

Virus or trojans

QuickScale is NOT a virus/trojan.

Running "anti-malware" programs (which includes anti-virus and anti-spyware software) is good practice and highly recommended (normally!).  There are, however, situations where anti-virus (AV) programs in particular can cause problems - and installing software is one of those situations.

Some AV programs are known to "interfere" with QuickScale (and other software) installations.  This "interference" is usually caused by an AV's process called "heuristic analysis". Whilst this process can be an effective way to locate unknown threats, there are downsides. The biggest downside is the increase in the number of "false-positive" (or "false alarm") results.

To allow your QuickScale installation to proceed without this interference, we strongly recommend that you temporarily disable your AV software whilst you install/activate QuickScale. You should, of course, re-enable your AV program once the installation/activation process has finished successfully.

We also recommend that you add the folder where QuickScale is installed to your AV program's "exclusion list" to ensure that QuickScale continues to operate correctly.

Disabling your anti-virus software

If you're not allowed to disable your AV product (because of company policy or 3rd party IT management) then you should contact your system administrator for advice.

If, however, you are allowed but you're not sure how, then try Googling using the following search text (without quotes): "disable {name of your AV software} antivirus during software installation"

What we're doing to try to minimise the problem

Before each QuickScale release we submit a number of our key files to VirusTotal for analysis. VirusTotal is a service provided by Google that runs each file submitted against a large range (60+) of anti-virus software packages and presents the results of the scan for each package. We'd like to say that we always get a 100% success rate - but we don't. Many modules do pass 100%; sometimes we'll get 98%; occasionally 89%.

The point is, it's very hard to get a 100% success rate across all components with software like QuickScale that comprises many different modules. We could embark on a process of submitting all our files to each of the dozens of anti-virus software vendors and ask them to give QuickScale files a "pass".  However, (a) not all anti-virus vendors provide such a facility (although many do) and (b) the amount of man-time required to keep submitting files to different anti-virus vendors for each update, would be significant and would inevitably lead to an increase in the amount we'd have to charge for QuickScale.

What we are exploring to further minimise the problem

We're constantly monitoring the situation and if the problem of AV false-positives gets out of hand, we're looking into the implications of obtaining a Class 3 digital certificate for use in digitally "signing" QuickScale files.  A Class 3 certificate is given only after independent verification and checking of identity and authority is done by the issuing certificate authority. For a small software company like Anyscale Ltd, the cost of obtaining and maintaining a Class 3 certificate, plus the man-time costs of implementing a code-signing process is something we will have to very carefully consider in terms of the implications for the price we charge for our software.

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