antivirus - Program made with PyInstaller now seen as a Trojan Horse by AVG

Question

About a month ago, I used PyInstaller and Inno Setup to produce an installer for my Python 3 script. My AVG Business Edition AntiVirus just started complaining with today's update that the program has an SCGeneric Trojan Horse in the main .exe file used to start the program (in the folder created by PyInstaller that has all of the Python "guts"). At first I just thought it was a false positive in AVG, but submitting the .exe file to VirusTotal I get this analysis:

https://virustotal.com/en/file/9b0c24a5a90d8e3a12d2e07e3f5e5224869c01732b2c79fd88a8986b8cf30406/analysis/1493881088/

Which shows that 11 out of 61 scanners detect a problem:

TheHacker   Trojan/Agent.am 
NANO-Antivirus  Trojan.Win32.Agent.elyxeb 
DrWeb   Trojan.Starter.7246 
Yandex  Trojan.Crypren!52N9f3NgRrY 
Jiangmin    Trojan.Agent.asnd 
SentinelOne (Static ML)     static engine - malicious 
AVG     SCGeneric.KTO 
Rising  Malware.Generic.5!tfe (thunder:5:ujHAaqkyw6C) 
CrowdStrike Falcon (ML)     malicious_confidence_93% (D) 
Endgame     malicious (high confidence)     20170503
Zillya  Dropper.Sysn.Win32.5954 

Now I can't say that these other scanners are ones that I have heard of before... but still I'm concerned that it is not just AVG giving a false positive.

I have submitted the .exe file in question to AVG for their analysis. Hopefully they will back off on whatever it is that they thought they were trying to detect.

Is there anything else I can do with PyInstaller to make it so that the .exe launcher that it created won't be considered a Trojan?

Thanks for any input.

Answer 1

I was always getting some false positives with Pyinstaller from VirusTotal. This is how I fixed it:

Pyinstaller comes with pre-compiled bootloader binaries for different OSs. I suggest compile them by yourself on your machine. Make sure everything is consistent on your machine. For Windows 64bit, install Python 64bit. Download PyInstaller 64bit for Windows. Make sure Visual Studio (VS) corresponding to your Python is installed, check below:

https://wiki.python.org/moin/WindowsCompilers

Compile the bootloader of Pyinstaller on your machine with VS. It automatically updates the run.exe, runw.exe, run_d.exe, runw_d.exe in DownloadedPyinstallerFolderPyInstallerootloaderWindows-64bit. Check below for more info on how to compile the bootloader:

https://pyinstaller.readthedocs.io/en/stable/bootloader-building.html

At the end install Pyinstaller. Within Pyinstaller directory run

python setup.py install