Avast anti-virus detects a DWS remote control agent

Hello everyone,

the Avast anti-virus is detecting the following:

MacOS:AdAgent-DW [PUP]

threat on n.13 Rust-related pacakges in the .cargo directory of my MacOSX 10.14.6 Mojave. I tried to search for the type of threat and it might refer to a remote control agent, this:

As long as the n.13 affected packages are all core Rust components, e.g., rustup, rustfmt, rust-gdb, cargo-fmt, rustc, etc. - that I installed via the standard rustup manager - is there a way to know if that AdAgent-DW is a malicious injected controller, or if that's a standard component of the Rust core packages?

Currently the n.13 detected files are put in quarantine by the Avast scanner - but then Rust is not working on my system anymore.

Any guess or suggestion?

Thank you in advance, Best Regards

I'm confused. Why do you believe 13 Rust related packages tagged as "potentially unwanted program" intersect with that DWService thing?

For what it's worth, on the Arduino forum, there is a steady stream of complaints about Avast mostly including false positives. So much so that I will never do business with Avast.

2 Likes

Hello, as a matter of facts the first thing I did was to submit those n.13 files to Avast - tagged as 'false positives' - for further analysis. Also, my initial guess about the DWService was because reading through their website I found the same
'DWAgent' denomination in their documents. I probably might be wrong about that correlation, though.

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