Haxe download claims to have Lineage.gen trojan in it

Question

I am setting myself up with FlashDevelop, and i went to download and install Haxe (which is the language i want to use) from this page (the windows installer), when my Windows Security Essentials said that Lineage.gen got stuck in my win32 directory from the downloaded installer (i didn't even run it yet). Did i download from the wrong site? Is it a false positive?

Answer 1

From the front page of the official site:

It seems that the Windows Installer is reported as infected by some antivirus software. This is a false report and you can safely run the program on your system: if it happens, please contact the antivirus' vendor so they can fix the issue as soon as possible.

This isn't that unusual. Unfortunately, there's no way to be 100% sure it's safe. The site could have been hacked by a criminal cartel - but it seems unlikely to be the case. If you're worried, try to find someone else who has downloaded it recently to vouch for it.

Answer 2

If you're really worrying about the false-positive, simply use Manual Install, which the instruction is shown on the lower part of the download page.

Answer 3

Post the file to http://www.virustotal.com/ to have it checked. You'll see the results of multiple virus detection engines.

Answer 4

Only Admin can upload files and only Nicolas uploads the downloads so always check the paths to make sure the files are hosted on haxe.org. The site is written in Neko which is more secure than PHP. The false positives have been reported to Norton and it should not be problem till maybe the next release, but we have added some scripts to comply with Norton rules. And as you can see from this link I have even posted links in a locked forum thread so they can not be easily changed.

http://haxe.org/download/norton http://haxe.org/forum/thread/4260

But if you have any doubt compiling from source is now relatively easy, so you don't have to take my word for it.