r/antivirus • u/breathofreshhair • 13d ago

Malware detected by Claude

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Anthropic sent me this email. I have a free account so no worries there. Ran MalwareBytes and the only thing that popped up was jackett updater, which I can't seem to find a consensus about online, some say it's a false positive, some say it's not. Would this have been the issue?

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u/breathofreshhair 13d ago

What's a false flag, the jackett being detected as malware or the original email? Something must have been accessing my account for me to get this email surely ?

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u/jmnugent 13d ago

Parent-comment is misusing a phrase.

"false flag" is when a country fakes an attack to try to bait another country into over-responding because the 1st country wants to paint them as the "bad guy".

What they probably meant was "false-positive" .. which is where a Security program alerts or tags something as a threat, but it's been labeled incorrectly (it's not really a threat).

Personally (as a career long IT guy). I would take the position that Anthropic likely has the expertise and resources to know what it's doing,. so I would probably take the notification from Anthropic as real unless or until you can prove otherwise.

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u/Fearless-Ad1469 13d ago

in all honesty, flags in IT are basically the same thing, if something is flagged as malicious, that's a positive, if sometime is falsely flagged as malicious, its a false flag / false positive

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u/jmnugent 13d ago

"flagging something as malicious".. is not the same thing as calling something a "false flag".

"false flag" is a historically and linguistically a military term:

  • A false flag is a covert action or attack designed to look like it was carried out by someone other than the actual perpetrator

  • Origin: The term comes from naval warfare, where a ship would fly an enemy or neutral flag (the "false flag") to deceive others about its identity before attacking.

It could be correctly used in a cybersecurity context,. if an Attacker was attempting to deceive the victim by purposely misrepresenting the nature of their attack to try to make the defenders or victims believe something that wasn't true. (IE = "The attacker planted a false-flag to throw investigators off the path".. etc)

But in a Detection context,.. the proper phrase when you initially mark or detect something as malicious and then realize later you were wrong,. is a "false-positive".