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Internal Protection Error, please contact to author!

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OmarFGarcia:
My P3D v5.1 was working perfectly fine until I updated it. Now I can use my airports because an "internal protection error"???
Not everybody is an expert on software especially after we paid lots of money on this. How can we fix it?

virtuali:

--- Quote from: colinm44 on September 15, 2020, 06:17:09 pm ---This must have happened during one of your latest updates. Who knows why.
--- End quote ---

This because antivirus vendors are in the business of letting you know they are being able to catch more virus than the competition, even ones that hasn't even been found yet. So they use questionable heuristic, trying to guess what a program is doing and in our case ( and so many other products that are mistakenly flagged as threats ), they are worried by the fact that:

- We update the updater very often, at minimum once every time a new product comes out, since the updater must be updated to know about that. The most flawed heuristic used by antivirus is the "reputation" system: a file that is new, coming from a small developer that is not Microsoft or Google or Adobe, is automatically blacklisted, until it gains enough reputation. This of course penalize exactly what we are: small developers that update very often. It happens EVERY TIME we release a new update: users with bugged antivirus come here reporting new threats, but after a week or so, all reports stops, then they start again on the next update, and so on.

- Our updater downloads stuff from the internet. That's what an updater is supposed to do, but some antivirus automatically flag this is bad behavior, as this was some kind of trojan.

- We obviously using strong encryption, because we need to check sensible data, like your own license, in the updater. You wouldn't want to use a software that handles your personal data and was NOT protected against tampering, meaning it cannot be decompiled, and an antivirus cannot peek inside it. So, the flawed heuristic they use assumes that "just" because a software is protected against prying eyes, it "might" be a threat, because usually real virus also protects themselves against tampering ( to defend themselves against antivirus products )

You might wonder why the industry hasn't found a better method to help legit products to not being confused with threats and, in fact, they industry TRIED to find a method, which is called "Software Taggant", which is an IEEE standard that uses a special digital signature to help antivirus products to recognize legit product ( virus writers don't usually get access to digital signature, since you must provide with a real name/address to get one ), here's some info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_taggant

And guess what, WE DO USE IT. Unfortunately, the ones that should also use it, that is lots of antivirus vendors, seems to ignore this standard, and rely more on their flawed heuristic, so they can advertise they can check more virus than the competition.

Not that these issues are not happening even to the best: there's a known issue with MS Windows Defender ( hopefully should be fixed faster ), which blocked MSFS 2020 to even start, happen even to one of our developers: he had to reinstall the whole Windows, because MSFS didn't work anymore, only to realize it was blocked by Windows Defender!!

flyblueskies:
Thank you Colinm44 for your last post.

I too use Sophos Home addition and had the same problem. I found I must add both couatil.exe and couatil2.exe as a local exclusion...

To do this:

1.Double click Sophos from your tray.
2. Click on HELP.
3. To the right, scroll to Trouble Shooting and click the down arrow.
4. You may need to scroll down, but look for the ADD button and click it.
5. Browse to the couatil.exe location and click it.
6. Repeat for couatil2.exe.

Now both files should be added as a local exclusion. After I did this, FSDT Updater ran without any issues.

Again, thank you Colinm44 for sharing this information!

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