Saturday, May 26, 2007

False positive

A few days ago AVG Anti-virus started reporting a trojan horse in Task Coach (0.63.2). A little investigation with the help of other py2exe users indicates that AVG detects a trojan in a specific part of py2exe. Py2exe is a program that is used to bundle python source code and the python interpreter into an executable that can be easily installed on Windows machines and doesn't require users to install python. It seems that someone wrote a trojan in python and bundled it with py2exe. Apparently, AVG is now triggered by py2exe instead of a signature that is specific for that trojan horse. It probably means that all applications bundled with py2exe are affected as well. What a bummer. But also kind of interesting to see how other applications, that have nothing to do with Task Coach itself, can cause bug reports about Task Coach.