WinPatrol Developer Says McAfee False Positive Affected His Business

Bill Pytlovany, the creator of WinPatrol, blames McAfee for lost customers after the security giant was inexplicably slow in resolving a false positive incident.

WinPatrol is a HIPS-type application, which makes use of several behavioral sensors to detect and block potentially malicious software.

In order to make its determinations, WinPatrol monitors changes made to registry start-up entries, the HOSTS file, file associations and other key areas of the computer.

BillP Studios, the company developing the software, has recently launched version 19, dubbed the "Cloud Edition," which adds community intelligence to its feature set.

According to Mr. Pytlovany, on October 2, McAfee's anti-malware products started detecting the new WinPatrol installer as being infected with a threat called Artemis!4FAE1D776481.

Judging by the name this was a generic detection triggered by the company's Artemis technology.

The developer managed to report the affected file as a false positive to McAfee and was informed on October 6 that the sample was forwarded to the company's researchers in India for a more in-depth analysis.

The antivirus vendor eventually whitelisted the file on October 10, eight days after it started detecting it and around a week after it was reported to them.

"This mistake by McAfee came at a time when a brand new version of WinPatrol was released and widely promoted.

"I can’t begin to imagine how many customers I’ve lost because McAfee wouldn’t allow them to install WinPatrol. I’m sad to say many believed McAfee and will never trust WinPatrol," Mr. Pytlovany wrote on his blog.

He also pointed out that the product's user-generated ratings on download portals have also been affected by the incident.

Of course, the issue isn't that McAfee detected a virus in WinPatrol's installer – such situations being common in the antivirus world – but the company's failure to act on it in a timely fashion.

In such cases, failure to act promptly can result in losses to others and McAfee, which is one of the leading vendors on the security market, clearly had the resources to handle the situation faster.

The latest version of WinPatrol can be downloaded here.