Anti-Virus Warnings

From Fmepedia

Q) My anti-virus software found a trojan virus on the FME CDROM! Do you not check your software before release?

A) We can assure you that this is a "false positive" match for an infected file and put you at ease that our product does not contain any viruses or Trojans.

In our build environment, we use Symantec's Corporate Anti Virus product to actively scan all files accessed during the build process. This includes when they are added to the installer. We also occasionally use Norton Anti Virus (a consumer product) and AVG Anti Virus (the free edition) to verify our products and none of these show any viruses in our products.

The way that many of these anti virus products work is that they use heuristic analysis or heuristic scanning. According to McAfee's Virus Glossary, a Heuristic Analysis is defined as, "Behavior-based analysis of a computer program by anti-virus software to identify a potential virus. Often heuristic scanning produces false alarms when a clean program behaves as a virus might" - so while our product may act like a known virus or a Trojan, it does not contain any.

If you turn heuristic scanning off during installation and manually scan the installed directory (on XP that's usually C:\Program Files\FME), our product should come away with a clean bill of health from your anti virus product. Once the scan is done, you should be able to safely turn heuristic scanning back on.

More than 3000 CDs are pressed and distributed for each release and, since most users' anti virus products are not triggering alerts during installation and the support team is not flooded with messages, we are confident that there is no virus or Trojan on the CD.