My programs are triggering anti-virus

I have about about a half-dozen programs that I have created for the company I work for, that are used on a daily basis. Quite often, but not always, they will trigger our corporate wide anti-virus program (Avast) for a user trying to run one of them. The anti-virus then tries to quarantine the program & deletes it from the folder where it resides (network location, not local HD). As you can imagine, this is quite a pain in the arse.
I also have a personal program that I created that is used by several hundred people worldwide, that also causes their AV to flag it.
Does anyone else have this issue? My programs don't do anything malicious, so I really dont understand why they would trigger any AV programs.
It appears that Windows Defender isn't a problem, just 3rd party AV programs. Is there anything I can do in my programs code to alleviate this?

Create exclusions in the AV configuration to not scan the folders your programs exist in.

See if Avast has a process where you can submit false positive .exe files to them so that they can do something that will prevent this from happening again.

Our IT dept has created global exclusions for these programs, but for some reason they dont stick. Maybe because I update the programs regularly & the signature changes?

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Originally Posted by nbrege

Our IT dept has created global exclusions for these programs, but for some reason they dont stick. Maybe because I update the programs regularly & the signature changes?

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If they are excluding it by some sort of file signature/hash, then yes, that would stop working when you update the .exe file.

What they should be doing instead, assuming Avast supports it, is simply excluding the entire path that your program resides in. Either by UNC path (\\ServerName\ShareName\FolderName\*) or drive path, if a mapped network drive is used.

OK, but what about the personal program that I have that others use? I guess the question comes back to why does it trigger an AV program? Like I said, there is nothing malicious about it. What is the AV program detecting to make it think my app is bad? How do other developers get around this?

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Originally Posted by OptionBase1

See if Avast has a process where you can submit false positive .exe files to them so that they can do something that will prevent this from happening again.

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Originally Posted by OptionBase1

See if Avast has a process where you can submit false positive .exe files to them so that they can do something that will prevent this from happening again.

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Not gonna go through that hassle. I believe I checked into it a few years ago & they wanted a fee to have your app certified as being "clean". I think my next course of action will be to convince our IT dept to remove Avast from certain PC's & just rely on Windows Defender

A/V tools flag up unknown binaries (or even unknown source code) as false positives, search this forum for information on Avast and what it does to unknown binaries even when exclusions are set. My first advice is to remove Avast and find another a/v tool, not easy in a corporate setting.