Missing files? Virus warning? Don't worry

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

After the FSL stunt I fully understand that people do not want to run FS add-on installers without having that active (I was one of the victims) and normally there should be no problem. But somebody (let's assume not a friend of Aerosoft) manually forwarded ALL (!) executable files in our product to at least one AV company as potentially dangerous. Now a normal company would give us a call (and one AV company did) but AV companies more or less standard add these files to the list of files to quarantine.

 

A good AV software would give a clear warning to the user and would ask if this should be done, but these days most do not and just remove the file. It's utterly disgusting, these companies have caused us tens of thousands in damages and when you call them they won't even talk to you.  They delete the files we sell and you buy that are perfectly fine and do not want to take any responsibility for that action. 

 

In the end there is almost nothing we can do about this. We'll add a pop-up in the installer to warn people but again I understand that after events earlier this year a warning like that will be seen as asking to open your system to illegal stuff. So in the forum and in ticket support we'll spend a lot of time explaining customer why things don't work and why we are helpless to avoid that.

[Flavio1 64]

Established that the files are clean, have you sent a legal notice to the offending interested S-H?

I trust AS and I have created an exception to AS files

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

Makes no sense to try to solve this in a legal sense.  We just need convince customers they can trust us.

[DaveCT2003 2553]

There is a lot of back story to this and we've received several inquiries so I'm going to address them all in one post.

 

For years Aerosoft and a few other third party flight sim developers sent all of the information to the various computer security developers with very little success as those companies never made the requisite changes.  One can only bang one's head against the wall so much, not to mention the financial cost of doing this for each product that requires it.

 

NOTE:  We're will NOT allow this to become bashing thread against any developers and I ask that readers respect that decision. That particular matter has already discussed to dust!

 

There was a time when the flight sim customers fully trusted flight sim software (making things really easy for customers to deal with) and the standard advice was to disable computer security software prior to installing flight sim software.  It is unfortunate that one or more third party flight sim developers chose to piggy back their DRM onto a piece of MALWARE, and this has and will continue to have a lasting impact on flight sim users (so they made a lasting impact on the flight sim world, just not how they imagined). 

 

Now I'm 100% confident in Aerosoft Software, but everyone has to make that decision for themselves.  Since Aerosoft included the software in the installer, there is really no need to report to us any of the associated files that are flagged because you already know the answer... we gave it to you, so we consider it to be safe.  But while I trust Aerosoft software, I still give any positives a look see.

 

Since the computer security software devs don't look at flight sim software (in their defense flight sim software is used by a much smaller number of people compared to other, non-flight sim software), users will have to make informed decisions on software/files flagged by their computer security software.

 

So once again... ask any developer of any software provided to a customer if it's safe and the answer will always be YES (even if it has MALWARE in it).  So asking isn't going to tell you if the software is really safe.  Once again, in the case of Aerosoft software I pretty much look at it all and everything I've ever had flagged is indeed safe.

 

What creates the false positives?

 

As flight sim software involves and new technology becomes available customers expect and push developers to create new, better and more innovative software.  You can see this first hand in the very special features found in the Aerosoft Airbus and most especially the Aerosoft Airbus Professional series aircraft.  Some of these special features require communication over the Internet and with other software installed on the customer's computer.  Those software modules read and write data (instead of just reading) and that is what is getting flagged.  So if you know that you're installing software that does this, and you leave you computer security software enabled during the install (and in some cases you don't exclude such files or folders after re-enabling) then you can reasonably expect some of the software to be flagged by your computer security software.

 

I hope this has been helpful to those who are experiencing these false positives.  The onus is always on individuals to ensure the software going on their computer is safe and my advice is to use common sense along with a little research to clear these files yourself... as I said, if you ask a company if their software is safe they are going to tell you it is (whether it is, or isn't).

 

Happy Flights!