I thought I had seen the end of this issue, but a user reported to me the other day that AVG was flagging QuickHash as being infected with FileRepMetagen malware.

Thankfully the user contacted me and we established that the issue was a false positive with AVG. This is not uncommon and I have seen reports of even mainstream hardcore forensic tools sometimes being flagged, falsely, by AV software.

I have no idea for sure how AV software works other than besides searching for know virus executables it also conducts heuristic scanning of files that MAY be suspicious based on certain criteria. QuickHash does have some fairly intricate mechanisms, especially in the disk hashing arena where it needs fairly low level access to the disk. I suspect this is what causes the problem because it needs admin rights and so on to do some of those tasks.

Suffice to say that QuickHash is not a virus or malware! It has no hidden adverts or dodgy things. It is open source after all!! The problem is that I have seen instances where malicious people are using its name to distribute virus packages in its name. So please only download the program from here. If you don’t, then you run the risk.