False-positives on VirusTotal

One-liner: yes, those are false-positives, and our software is 100% safe and virus-free!

Some users have reported that when they scan our Syncplify Server! installer with multiple engines using VirusTotal, they occasionally receive one or two warning (out of 70+ antivirus engines that VirusTotal employs).

It was out duty to investigate.

First and foremost, let us confirm, for everyone’s peace of mind, that our software is absolutely virus-free and safe to use, so those are so-called “false positives”.

Why is it happening? We narrowed it down to the fact that in order to run our software as a Windows system service, we take advantage of a little piece of 3rd-party software called NSSM.

NSSM is a tiny piece of software that allows any console (stdin/stdout) application to be executed as a system service in Windows. This was not developed by Syncplify, but we adopted it because of the great flexibility and reliability it offers. Sadly, we learned that some antivirus engines flag this little executable as suspicious (it not flat-out as malware).

We are, therefore, hard at work to drop the need for NSSM, and turn the Windows version of our software into a set of native system services, thus bypassing the issue entirely.

As always, thank you for your trust and for your patience.