Get rid of the virus scanning rule in B&P

[Cypher]

In response to this:
http://www.mmowned.com/forums/bots-p...-programs.html

"2) Allways scan the files you are about to share with both VirusTotal - Free Online Virus and Malware Scan and Online malware scan."

I must admit I feel that's a pretty stupid rule.

Tools like VirusTotal give (imo) a false sense of security. Anyone with even basic program knowledge can whip together a packer that can make viruses turn up clean on VT etc.

For example I wrote my own simple packer and it can take any piece of malware and make it turn up 100% clean on VT and similar services.

These multi-scanning services ONLY DO FILE SCANS. That means that they only use the most basic scanning functionality. The only way to really catch malware effectively is by hooking it at runtime.

Yes, whilst I realize tools like VT pick up some of the more common viruses just fine, you're much more likely to see something "homebrew" on a forum like this, where it steals your WoW details or something (as this is a targetted audience). Just look at how much "homebrew" malware used to come out of the scamming section.

Furthermore, due to the nature of hacking tools, they often raise false positives. This just causes a major annoyance for the releaser of the hack due to the hundreds of idiots claiming that the VT screenshot says it's a virus or some shit.

So, I propose that the rule be removed. If you're the type of user that is stupid enough to get infected with malware, you should be running desktop AV software. If you're not the type of user that gets infected with malware, and you don't run AV software, you should have the skills required to identify malware via revserse engineering, virtualization, etc.

I just believe that the scans don't really help anyone. They give a false sense of security to the people stupid enough to get infected, and they're useless to those of us who are our own AV solution.

[KuRIoS]

noted and will be discussed with the proper ppl.