Blog Essay: AutoHotKey is NOT a Virus, Worm, or Trojan!

[mouser]

DC Member App103 wrote a great rant today on the irresponsible behavior of antivirus companies regarding utilities built with the AutoHotkey Programming Language:

I am so sick and tired of irresponsible antivirus companies unfairly flagging compiled AutoHotKey (AHK) scripts as viruses, trojans, and worms.

AutoHotKey is a free, open source scripting language, just as much as Perl, Python, Ruby, or JavaScript is a scripting language.

There is nothing wrong with the language itself, nor is there anything wrong with most scripts written in it. A lot of really awesome, useful, Windows utilities have been developed in AutoHotKey.

The language is powerful, easy to learn, enables you to write Windows utilities very quickly, and you can compile them to .exe and distribute them to others that don't have AutoHotKey installed, or you can give them the source script (.ahk) and they can run that if they do have it installed.

The problem is that there are idiots that will write malware in AHK, just as there are idiots that will write malware in any other programming language. You can't blame the language for this. And you can't blame all the developers that use the language, either.

But that is exactly what the antivirus companies are doing. They have decided that if a single person writes and compiles malware in AHK, then all compiled AHK scripts are malware. This results in tons of false positives, ruined reputations of innocent programmers, and a mistrust in AHK applications by the general public.

http://cranialsoup.blogspot.com/2008/12/autohotkey-is-not-virus-worm-or-trojan.html

[vaniklot]

thanks for the info.

[Mark0]

I think that's depend on the fact that the bundled executables AHK create are packed, and many AV software have a seriously bad attitude regarding to compressed EXEs.