[RESOLVED] Detecting a program on a remote computer, Possible?

RottNKorpse

I have had people contacting me saying there is a virus on my site but I've done countless scans and found nothing...It is all due to the fact that Norton and McAfee are utter garbage.

So I was wondering, is there a way I could add something to detect if a user has one of those programs running and if so to display a message to them about it?

I realize that this is a weird question and the answer very well and most likely is no but I just wanted to ask to make sure.

laserlight

So I was wondering, is there a way I could add something to detect if a user has one of those programs running and if so to display a message to them about it?

They might think that the virus is trying to pretend to be not a virus.

RottNKorpse

well the funny thing is SiteAdvisor.com which McAfee provides has scanned the site numerous times and found nothing as well as scanners on the server itself and found nothing...yet those two and only those two AVs issue an error. It's like they are sharing each other's inferior programming.

Any idea of what I could do to fix this?

laserlight

Any idea of what I could do to fix this?

Warn your users in an FAQ or something.

RottNKorpse

well I've done that but was hoping I could do more...anyway thanks for your help and your quick response.

laserlight

well I've done that but was hoping I could do more

Generally, you cannot use PHP to unilaterally find out if an arbitrary program is installed on a user's computer.

anyway thanks for your help and your quick response.

No problem. Remember to mark this thread as resolved using the thread tools.

NogDog

Are these virus warnings for some particular file that is being accessed or downloaded, or for the site in general?

Perhaps you need to contact Norton et al to get an explanation as to why they are flagging that file/site, and if it is a "false positive", find out if there is some work-around you can use to avoid it. (Perhaps if it's an image file, simply converting it to a different format?)

Anyway, to answer your original question, I can see no way to determine if a user is running one of those programs, other than something like an ActiveX program or similar, which has a couple problems: (1) the user has to agree to allow such a program to run in the first place, and (2) it's probably the sort of thing those security programs would (correctly) flag as a security risk.

RottNKorpse

NogDog wrote:
Are these virus warnings for some particular file that is being accessed or downloaded, or for the site in general?

I am told it is for one file but that one file is basically the backbone of the CMS so it is displayed in every url.

NogDog wrote:
Perhaps you need to contact Norton et al to get an explanation as to why they are flagging that file/site, and if it is a "false positive", find out if there is some work-around you can use to avoid it. (Perhaps if it's an image file, simply converting it to a different format?)

I'll do that now...thanks.

NogDog wrote:
Anyway, to answer your original question, I can see no way to determine if a user is running one of those programs, other than something like an ActiveX program or similar, which has a couple problems: (1) the user has to agree to allow such a program to run in the first place, and (2) it's probably the sort of thing those security programs would (correctly) flag as a security risk.

yea I understand...probably not going to be a good way to go. 🙂