fman and antivirus

Written by Michael

As a desktop application, fman is often flagged as malware by antivirus tools such as Avast, Symantec, Avira, SentinelOne, AVG, and Cisco Sourcefire / AMP.

Being fman's author, I obviously claim that fman is not malware. I have zero interest in infecting your computer with viruses. My goal is to create the world's best file manager. When I'm approached by companies who want me to turn your computer into a botnet, I tell them to go fuck themselves:

Of course, you should not take my word for it. Read this blog to judge for yourself what my intentions are. If you are left with any doubt of my or fman's integrity, you should not install it.

To be sure I'm not infected myself and am thus spreading malware unintentionally, I used AVG to perform a "deep scan" of the machine that builds fman. The only thing it "found" was fman itself:

So either I'm lying, or AVG and other tools are simply wrong to classify fman as malware.

Antivirus tools have a strong incentive to be quick to mark fman (and other software) as viruses: It's their business. The more often they can throw a popup in your face that says that they just saved your (computer's) life, the more you will think "boy, this antivirus tool is really doing it's job. I better keep it."

Yet there have been many cases where antivirus tools left users more vulnerable. Google's Project Zero has repeatedly found security holes created by antivirus software (1, 2, 3). A former Mozilla developer even advises: "antivirus software vendors are terrible; don't buy antivirus software, and uninstall it if you already have it". He only excludes Microsoft's as trustworthy. Incidentally, this one has never flagged fman.

The reason why antivirus tools mark fman as malware is probably that they haven't encountered it very often yet. What you can do to help with this (and to get fman to run on your system) is to mark it as a false positive. Here are some links to the corresponding forms / how-tos:

I just did this (again). But it helps if you do it too.

Thanks for reading. And sorry for the trouble.
Michael