downloader virus

False Positive Downloader Virus Caused by WP-Stats

Recently, I was getting a false positive virus detection from Symantec Antivirus on one of my blogs. I had just upgraded this particular blog to WordPress version 2.x The file in question was wp-stats[1].htm located in my temporary internet files. The file was never found and therefore could not be removed. It was driving me crazy!

First I called my web hosting service and asked them to scan my blog for viruses. I was told they don’t do that. So I downloaded my current blog files and scanned all the files locally and did not find any viruses. Just as I suspected, this might be a false positive virus detection.

I searched the entire internet for any information on this issue and didn’t find anything directly related to my specific problem. So I decided to completely remove my blog and install a fresh new downloaded copy of WordPress version 2.x and, after all that, I still found I was getting the same Downloader virus detection caused by the wp-stats[1].htm file.

Now I was completely frustrated to no end. For some crazy lucky reason I decided to go through all my blog option settings and when I deleted the Blog address (URL): found under Options then the General tab within WordPress administration and then saved my updated settings. WordPress automatically populates the blog address field back in upon saving. This fixed the false positive Downloader virus detection that was occurring anytime somebody visited my blog and was using Symantec Antivirus and maybe any other antivirus software.

My guess is that I must have mistyped the blog address url entry at some point and that was causing the problem.

CORRECTION: The issue returned shortly after I posted this blog entry. So I went back through my blog piece by piece and located an entry in one of my blog postings that looks like what is posted at this link:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/151888

It is a traffic statistics script that was inserted into one of my blog postings.