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How to hack a competitor
2 points by ironmantra 3756 days ago
yesterday Norton started freaking out and going through all of my zip backups deleting my installer from each one. This installer has been shipping since November, is certified by ASP, and multiple download sites. Best I can tell, someone decided to flag the installer, not the app itself, as a virus. In effect, this attack shut down the ongoing downloads of my app. I'm a soloprenuer so these types of things affect me more than larger companies. After realizing what was happening, I sent a notice to Symantec telling them my app was clean. They reviewed the files and agreed but it takes 24 hours to replicate. The white listing of the app can be done in advance https://submit.symantec.com/whitelist/isv/ which I will do from now on. Just caught me off guard. Seems like a dirty trick to play on someone. It isn't the first I've seen.
1 comments

"someone decided to flag the installer"

This most probably wasn't a malicious action by a competitor. Anti-virus programs frequently report false positives - they're far from perfect.

Installers tend to do weird things that are similar to things that viruses do, e.g., write to the Windows registry. Maybe your installer is doing something in a way that made Norton think it's malicious. The fact that Symantec has a simple process for dealing with situations like this would be an indication that they frequently make mistakes.