...only since the most recent update of Norton did it begin flagging Daz installers for me and then only the latest version of the Daz .exe’s for new content releases.
When this occurs the message I receive is that it is due to the fact there haven’t been enough Norton users who have downloaded the product yet to establish its “trust” level. The previous series of installers as well as older ones don’t trigger this alert, nor do .zip files. I have checked my system with a couple other malware utilities and everything is clean, so it is something in the structure of the .exe file as well as it’s “newness” that causes Norton and other AVs to issue the false positives.
A good example was the Young Teens5 Pro Bundle. Though all the files use the newest .exe format, by the time I actually got to download everything (the day after I made the purchase) enough other people had already done so to satisfy Norton’s criteria for “trustworthiness” and nothing was flagged.
The Teens5 situation was in a sense a “perfect storm” of a highly anticipated and long awaited product with a glitch in the site software that allowed it to be purchased as part of the Snowball Bundle deal. At one point during the day the store actually went offline due to server overload.
I have seen it happen with earlier versions of nortons. When scanning it would pick up some of the older files even. I believe the exe file format that they have used is similar to one of the ones that they flagged and that is one of the reasons why it can be picked up, but it is also due to the fact that the files from DAZ are not commonly downloaded as I’ve seen similar messages from the windows/explorer download system.
I think it is very unlikely that DAZ would get infected but I suppose anything is possible and in the end it’s up to the user to decide what they feel comfortable doing. I can only say in the seven years I’ve been downloading files from DAZ I’ve had no problems caused by their downloads.
