My C# app is getting flagged by anti-virus apps. How do I figure out why? [closed]

Question

I have a C# app that is getting flagged by multiple anti-virus apps (AVG and Norton so far) as "behaving suspiciously". I don't have any experience with this, and there are lots of things I suppose could be considered "suspicious" (registry access, IPC with a local service using named pipes, copying files to local app data folder, etc), but I don't know where to start.

Note that the apps aren't saying my app is a virus or infected with a virus - but that it is suspicious.

How can I get an idea of which part of my app is causing these issues?

Answer 1

I'd recommend troubleshooting steps.

If you can reproduce the problem reliably on your dev machine, start commenting out code sections until it stops happening. Then start uncommenting until it happens again. That will at least narrow down what section of your code is causing the problem.

Answer 2

You will need to contact the antivirus companies to whitelist your application. Unfortunately this will need to be done for each one of them separately and they have their own process. Here are the links for AVG and Norton.

This process usually takes time so you may want to account for that.