MacReiter: Just out of curiosity, could someone who has successfully installed the game upload the TOEE.exe file to virustotal.com and let us know which AV engines gripe about it?
psicat: Symantec, TheHacker, TrendMicro, TrendMicro-HouseCall, VBA32, ViRobot, VirusBuster, Norman, nProtect, Panda, PCTools, Prevx, Rising, Sophos, Sunbelt, McAfee, McAfee-GW-Edition, K7AntiVirus, Jiangmin, Ikarus, F-Prot, eSafe, Emsisoft, Comodo, CAT-QuickHeal, AhnLab-V3, AntiVir, Antiy-AVL, Authentium
Wow. Not that I use any of those, but that's quite a few to be triggering.
Best guess -- TOEE is wrapped in an EXE encrypter/packer in an attempt to slow down hackers. At one point, that was a valid thing to do (I know -- I did it to a program that I've developed and sold), but in the last few years, a lot of the antivirus products have blanket marked any program using an encryption/packing wrapper as suspicious, because it means that the scanner can't get to the "real" exe to see what it is / does.
Oddly, if that is the case, it means that either GOG unpacked it, removed DRM, and repacked it (highly, highly unlikely), or the DRM was handled through an external system outside the packed TOEE, which means all the hackers (and GOG) had to do was replace the external system with one that said "yep, we're all good".
Of course, I'm just theorizing about all of this... It could be that Troika tried to do their own counter-hacking code, using self-modifying code or something, and that's what's setting off the virus checkers.
ro_lland: But we are also customers of GOG. We have purchased the software in a good faith that it will be compatible with our software. TOEE description does not include disclaimer: does not work with most of antivirus software. GOG used old crack to remove DRM, this crack shows up as Trojan on scanners. If they've used something else, there would be no issue.
(I'm going to start off somewhat argumentative, but also read to the end where I retract my entire earlier statement)
Technically, you purchased it in good faith that:
1. It would work with your operating system (no guarantees anywhere about other software, simply because there are too many variables)
2. It would not contain a virus/trojan/malware
It would appear that there is no actual malware involved. While a lot of AV programs are complaining, there are also a large number of very well known scanners that are absent from the list above. To my eyes, that list consists of a lot of products that are known for false positives and a lot of products I've never even heard of.
As for how the DRM was removed -- I would definitely want to have that nocd crack checked very thoroughly. But really, unless the publisher is willing and able to unwrap the exe, that's as good as it's going to get. Back in the early days of GOG, some of the claims suggested that they had somebody on team that lived and breathed for reverse engineering and direct binary patching. Not so much. And publishers rarely (never?) have the code and tools and so forth necessary to recreate a DRM-less version of the software (and would be unwilling to spend the necessary effort even if they could, as it would consume a large hunk of any profits made via GOG sales through labor cost -- GOG's primary benefit to publishers is that it costs them nothing but permission to have another source of money coming in). So things like this have to be done via external nocd cracks.
Now, if there were multiple nocd cracks available for TOEE (I haven't looked), then it would have been nice to use the least "alarming" one :)
ro_lland: All I ask from them is to use this link:
http://www.mcafee.com/us/threat_center/dispute/dispute_form.asp and notify McAfee that software published by GOG is not a virus.
And proof that my entire "McAfee only listens to customers" argument is completely invalid.
Although I will point out, having just gone to that site, that it asks a lot of questions that I have not seen answered in any of these posts, which would make it difficult for GOG to fill out said form:
Product and version:
Engine Version:
DAT Version:
Detection type as given by McAfee: (this one is not required, but when I pop down the list I find it interesting that it lists cracks and keygens. This strongly suggests that this is not a false positive, but something that they are actively trying to kill. If that _is_ the case, they will ignore the dispute, because the file is exactly what they say it is -- a cracked version -- and they don't want cracked versions to exist. This is probably because they themselves use DRM and wish to support all other DRM users and "hurt" pirate users. This would also explain why the commercial AV scanners are tripping, and the free ones are not so much. Though, again, I'm extrapolating wildly here...)
I believe that would be enough info for GOG to submit on your behalf.