Antivirus False-Positive Alerts, Evading Malware Detection, and Cyber-security Issues

The continuous development of evolving malware types creates a need to study and understand how antivirus products detect and alert users. This paper investigates today's antivirus solutions and how their false-positive alerts affect software development and the distribution process. The authors discuss and demonstrate how antivirus detection deals with bespoke applications and how this can be reversed and manipulated to evade detection, allowing the process to be used by malicious software developers. The paper also demonstrates how an undetected malicious piece of software can be developed without using advanced hiding techniques, which will also be capable of overcoming reputation-based detection systems.