Re: Why are some games flag as a harmful file?

Anti virus software looks for different signs that a file might contain a virus. It tries to perform heuristic analysis on how a file might behave, what things it might access and so on. They also use a database of signatures, which are basically patterns of data that is known to come from a virus. And sometimes to air on the side of caution such a signature may not be very specific or the anti-virus software might be configured to flag something even if the presence of potentially viral data isn't very high. Such signatures can for example include patterns that indicate a programming language commonly used to make a virus like AutoIt or Pure Basic was used, or the application was compressed with an Exe packer - it's a program that can be used on a compiled exe to make it smaller, but virus creators often use these to make decompilation and reverse engineering more difficult and this is the case with BGT programs. Such a pattern might also indicate a large, obfiscated block of compiled code that is jumped to by a small subroutine right when the program launches - which is also something BGT does because it has to run the compiled angelscript somehow.

So the gist of it is that because virus coders are moving so quickly, AV companies try to take into consideration the most common tactics to catch as many things as possible. They think that it's better to have more false positives, but also make it more likely that the software will catch something that hasn't been officially identified yet. And considering a lot of customers  of these companies are businesses running locked down networks that are susceptible to attack from a random person bringing an infected flash drive at home or clicking on the wrong Email attachment, they feel it's the far safer option because they're less likely to lose a customer if the software misses an actual virus.

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