About Malicious Software False Positive

Recently we saw numerous reports about Computta app being flagged or blocked by anti-virus software as a “malicious software”. A few articles by anti-virus activists also appeared on the Web. This is our response to one such article, which you can generally apply to any of similar reports re our app.

First of all thank you (anti-virus vendors and activists) for your efforts of fighting malicious software and keeping the Web secure and safe.

But as one of the creators of Computta service I’m pretty worried about your report on computta-miner.exe, which is a part of downloadable Computta app .

Our goal at Computta is to give our users the ability to mine cryptocurrencies with minimal efforts. Our service has been functioning for almost two years now and we have been doing our best to be an honest player in the field.

By all means we try to restrict/prevent malicious usage of our software:

  • Computta app is distributed only with GUI based installer
  • all the executables and dlls are signed with Computta certificate (with our contact email embedded)
  • during installation the app is registered in the Windows registry of installed applications and can be easily uninstalled by standard Windows means
  • Uninstall.exe resides alongside the main program and is added to the Windows Start menu
  • We continuously reject user requests to add a ‘hidden’ mode
  • Computta icon always resides in the tray and the application is shown whenever the icon is clicked
  • After initial installation the program starts mining only after executing the benchmark test which requires user interaction
  • Latest versions of application are running without elevated admin privileges (earlier versions did) to potentially be less suspicious to aniti-virus software
  • After installation the application accesses only ‘temp’ and ‘/.computta’ folders
  • In the latest versions we renamed all miner.exe executables to computta-miner.exe so the process becomes more identifiable.

We do have remote update functionality because crypto world is rapidly changing and mining algorithms may quickly become non-viable (like it lately happened several times with Monero CryptoNight hardforks). Without timely updates users would just be burning their power with no returns.

Due to a possible bug it may sometimes happen that the main program crashes and the child mining process computta-miner.exe remains running (unlike Linux, Windows doesn’t automatically kill children) in an uncontrolled manner. However even in this case the mining profits are still going to the user account.

We are kindly asking you to contact us if you have any evidence of malicious installations and use of Computta application. We will immediately ban and further investigate accounts which are involved in such activity. We will appreciate if you also give us some advice on how to prevent this in future versions of our app.

Thanks again for your cooperation!

Sincerely, Computta Development Team

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