Google Shakes Hand with Microsoft to Eradicate False Positives in Malware

The archenemies in the tech-industry, at least the thought-so archenemies, Microsoft and Google that happen to consume the major share in the industry today, as per Google News, happen to be on a joint venture of eradicating the false positives of malware.

The term the false positive malware has gained a major attraction recently. Any legit file being marked a malware by the anti-virus is called the false positive. This is a basic threat as any reasonable file that the user might be working on or has worked on can be flagged, can crash the system or fail to boot. Google has listed the concerns in the way:

1. The developers' business shall go through a lot of harm as major users will find the chunks of programs or the entire programs unusable.
2. The programs that are effected will suddenly be bombarded with user emails consisting of complaints.
3. Any software that users use in order to perform critical tasks will not be available for users.
4. Antivirus vendors' might be seeing the business in harmful state and also their reputation.

The project has taken another big step by including Microsoft in it since the legit files will be marked as a malware in the Windows system. The online scanning provision, VirusTotalbrought by Google last year has decided to acknowledge this factor. Microsoft has been more than delighted to be on board in order to work on this. However, it is strictly an “operate independently” initiative. The clause says:

“We have been working on this for just one week and with just one company, Microsoft, yet results look very promising: over 6000 false positives have been fixed. We would like to extend a big thank you to the Microsoft team for sharing metadata about its software collection and to the antivirus industry as a whole for the false positives remediation.”

Since the antivirus industry is supposed to be more proactive when it comes to latest technologies, it is indeed very challenging for them. Also, when we come to think of it, it is not only the antivirus industry but also the software industry that is going to be affected by such major issue. It is an effective initiative that Google has taken so that aims to scan the files and let the user know if they are flagged false positive or not. Google has been known to introduce us to the bugs that different software companies have had in them previously as well. Therefore, expecting this from Google wasn’t that surprising.