False Virus Flagging

Hey everyone,

just wanted to write this because I've been noticing an increase in false positives for viruses in some of my mod files. I noticed that it's not just mods; if I package a zip archive of just images, it's been getting flagged as a virus as well.

TL;DR: My files don't have viruses, guaranteed. If you're being prevented from downloading and installing the mod, please temporarily disable your anti-virus but don't forget to RE-ENABLE once you have the mod downloaded. In addition, I won't be re-uploading files to fix a "ghost" issue. Re-uploading takes A LOT of my time because my re-upload speeds are bad and I have to re-upload for MediaFire, Google Drive, and MEGA.

You are free to use any external program to scan and verify that the file is cleaned by the way.

As an explanation (credit to Sun Rider for the information), Windows Defender has been struggling to correctly identify false positives, especially with zipped files. Windows Defender uses machine learning to detect threats, and it does this by looking for patterns in data. If you change it even little, then Windows Defender may not be able to recognize it as the same software anymore. This is because the patterns in the data have changed. As a result, Windows Defender may flag the zipped software as a threat, even if it is not actually a threat. This is known as a false positive. If receiving a "Trojan:Script/Wacatac.H!ml alert" it is likely due to Windows Defender not being able to recognize the compressed file. Compressed files can change the patterns in the data that Windows Defender uses to detect threats.

I've been hearing about other authors having the same issue. Not sure if it's something that will eventually be fixed by Microsoft but it looks like someone has already submitted a ticket explaining the issue and even submitted their own mod to see why it's being flagged.

Anyway I just wanted to quickly write this post just to ease some of the concerns for the people that were getting the virus alerts for my mod. Feel safe to download them.