FMod - Antivirus Issues

I have received reports from members of the Keen modding community that Abiathar is setting off antivirus alerts and generally being misidentified as malware or a PUP. I wrote a little post on Keen:Modding about it, which has been adapted here.

I did a VirusTotal scan of it which came up fully clean, except for the Heuristics thinking that it's possibly a PUP. This is due to it packing executables (the updater, but mostly the DOS programs, especially CKPatch, in the File Emitter). 

FMod.dll (FleexCore) contains a whole bunch of bit-twiddling methods necessary to open the graphics, levels, and tileinfo. It's doing low-level operations from a format spec standpoint, but from a managed environment, so this probably isn't the issue. 

The new memory manager might also be causing trouble - there is a possibility that what I'm doing with the memory manager to throw out my cached view states is similar to the way some viruses get into protected memory. 

Antivirus hates the updater because it is, in essence, a benevolent and non-controlling remote access trojan. It works by checking my Dropbox for a newest-version file, using that to find that version's update script, and then running that script according to some very specific and safe rules. The AV programs are right to be suspicious of such activity, but I promise that the updater only updates Abiathar. 

The config files are probably disappearing because Avast likes to place (without telling you) suspicious programs in a "sandbox", which restricts their ability to create files. 

Finally, it now comes to mind that by loading extensions (did I mention the program has an extension API?) from appropriately named dynamic link libraries in the residing folder, Abiathar transfers control out of my safely engineered code. Please don't install Abiathar extensions if you don't trust the publisher. 

So, I'm sorry about this. There are a lot of things that AV can be paranoid about, but it's all quite legitimate. Please trust me :/