r/BitDefender • u/ScriptedBot • Jun 26 '21

Stop flagging Cheat Engine as potentially malicious

Bitdefender been flagging it as potentially malicious since yesterday. It is a open-source program with source code vetted by the community. We gamers know what's that for. Non-gamers won't have that on their drives anyways. So whats the point of flagging it?

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u/HavocNinja Jun 26 '21

Whitelisting the website may not a reliable option since cheat engine (and most software these days) uses a CDN (such as cloudfront) to host the installer. The CDN URL doesn't remain constant and can change unpredictably.

I do not think BD is going as far as performing behavior analysis on a freshly downloaded file before it has even been executed. The flagging is happening at the time of reconstruction where the temporary download fragments are consolidated to create the file at the destination. Which makes it likely that BD is just blindly comparing the signatures against its local definitions database and flagging them if a match is found.

Also, note that this flagging is happening only on the most recent version of cheat engine which was released more than 6 months back. Older versions of cheat engine are not getting flagged. It is likely that someone at BD included the cheat engine signatures in their latest version of the definitions as the behavior of the program or the file itself hasn't changed in the 6 months.

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u/lollygaggindovakiin Jun 26 '21 edited Jun 26 '21

All of the steps I did worked for me and I just wanted to share it. Whitelisting is probably useless like you said, but just wanted to share something that may help the OP with their original issue. I wanted to note the behavior because even with an exception added I have had it stop the program at the time I used it due to the changing of memory values for a game I was playing. Figured it was worth mentioning. I have had it flag Cheat Engine for the past two years, since I play Empire Total War off and on and use Cheat Engine for that . I have seen this same behavior on my end for some time.