Everytime I browse Lemmy, my Bitdefender always pops up
Should I just ignore and/or whitelist this? Gotta admit it’s a bit c/MildlyInfuriating tho…
My Avast doesn’t say anything when visiting those instances, although it blocks connections to derp.foo even when it’s just pictures browsing from lemmy.world. It says it’s being infected by “URL:Botnet”.
Eh, it’s kinda annoying but it does its job. Plus I hate subscriptions and the best free option I’ve found (I don’t think they do one-time payment AVs anymore?) is Avast + Malwarebytes. What do you suggest?
Just uninstall all of it and let Windows take care of itself. You don’t need antivirus. Do avoid obviously suspicious files, and you should be fine.
This has nothing to do with lemmy.world.
I think you can just white-list them
Here is a log when browsing Lemmy over the last week or so, as of 10th July.
Believe the derp.foo and .today are both federated instances. Don’t know what the other rows are.
I had that popup too. I found the actual URL it was triggering on, and submitted a false positive to BitDefender. I would recommend you do the same. BitDefender should then release an updated database that whitelist it.
Link: https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/29358/
When something like these pop up, what steps can someone take to determine whether they are false positive and actually safe or a valid alert?
BitDefender is actually really bad about giving you useful information to go off. Ideally it should tell you exactly what malicious action or malware it’s detecting. If your AV does this, you can see if the particular type of detection makes sense.
For example, if it’s an executable file with a clearly displayed malware name “Trojan.BadTimes.X” or something, that’s really bad news. Same for URLs. However, sometimes AVs will flag “malicious behaviour”, which gets trickier. They will often flag qBittorrent or other legit apps that are used to download pirated software, etc.
What you can do is to submit the file or URL that was flagged to VirusTotal. This shows you a comprehensive list of whether any other antivirus software is also marking the file/URL as infected.
Generally though, I’d play it safe. I’d get in touch with the page owner or google around to see if this is a known issue, and unless I can be completely sure it’s actually safe, I wouldn’t use it.
Thanks so much! You’ll see in my post there were also alerts from Malwarebytes, so good to know the above steps thanks!
