Microsoft Defender decided that QARTest is dangerous.
September 1, 2020
If you use Microsoft Defender as antivirus, you are likely to be notified of a virus during download or QARTest installation.
All of a sudden, in mid August, Defender started to sweep away QARTest existing installations and blocking updates and new installations, reporting the presence of a virus in it. Needless to say that there is NO virus: QARTest doesn't contain and never contained malware, spyware, trojan or rubbish like that. I check every new version with a pool of antivirus (VirusTotal), and none of my users ever got infected by my software simply because there is NO virus in it!
No other AV reports anything, and this should make you think, but I encourage you to test it by yourself with another antivirus of your choice.
This is also known as a "False positive", that is, an incorrect detection: there is no threat, but the Defender says there is.
QARTest has many internet features (telnet dx cluster, web pages such as score tables, udp broadcast, upload to hrd...) and this is probably reason for Defender to report a false positive.
If you are experiencing the Defender false positive warning, hoping that Micorsoft one day will recognize it and fix things, you have three options:
- Trust Defender, uninstall QARTest (or not install it at all) and go with another software
- Pick and install another antivirus (there is a wide choice of free AV)
- Add QARTest folder in the exclusion list of Defender
If you're interested in the latter, here is how to do it:
There are multiple ways to successfully install QARTest preventing Defender to remove it.
The following is the simplest:
1) Open the Windows Security center (double click the shield icon on the Windows task bar at the bottom-right of the screen)
2) Click Virus & threat protection
3) Under Virus & threat protection settings click Manage settings
4) Under Real-time protection set the switch to OFF
5) Leaving Windows Security center open, now download and install QARTest (if it's the first install it's recommended to leave the default C:\QARTest path)
6) Back to Defender, scroll down to Exclusions and click on Add or Remove exclusions
7) Click on Add an exclusion, select "Folder" and browse to C:\QARTest (or whatever install path you chose) and click Select folder.
8) Re-activate real-rime protection setting the switch back to ON (see Step 4)
Done.
For future updates, if Defender stops you during download, repeat steps 4, 5 and 8. If not, there's nothing else to do and update shoud install without issues.
IT