VirusTotal has introduced a new flag called Trusted Source which will show that the downloads are from a trusted source, even if some antivirus software wrongly flag it as malware (false positive). This will help software developers avoid problems being created due to their clean software being shown as malware.
False Positives means the false report or the mistaken detections given by an antivirus software where a harmless file is wrongly classified as a virus.
False Positives which are very common nowadays hurts the reputation of antivirus software and also brings some other issues like bad impact on business, too many support tickets and much more.
Under its project ‘Trusted Source’, VirusTotal, a service owned by Google, asks the software companies to list their legitimate files in their software catalogue. The well-categorized catalogue then marks the files accordingly and notify the vendor if any antivirus software wrongly detect their file as a virus. This quick alert will help the vendors to rectify the false positive instantly which will further avoid any kind of serious consequences.
The official blog post by VirusTotal says,
“We have been working on this for just one week and with just one company, Microsoft, yet results look very promising: over 6000 false positives have been fixed. We would like to extend a big thank you to the Microsoft team for sharing metadata about its software collection and to the antivirus industry as a whole for the false positives remediation.”
The ‘Trusted Source’ project makes sure that the false positives do not mislead the users with wrong detections. The project not only notifies the vendors about false positives but also lessens the chances of false detection considerably.
Moreover, mistaken detections or false positives are also dropped from the positives count and degraded and demoted to the bottom of the report.
