The updated version of this tutorial (based on the latest webpage) is available now. Go to have a check here! 

For the last few weeks, a number of users have reported to us about getting “Trojan” warnings from Windows Defender and other anti-virus software alike. We, the Octoparse Team would like to reassure you that there is NO malicious malware hidden in the files of our program and that your malware detection is a simple consequence of our protective mechanism being unidentified by anti-virus software.

Product security is of paramount importance at Octoparse. In order to protect our intellectual property, Octoparse employs a strict self-protective mechanism to prevent our coding from being infringed, decompiled or reversed. As Malware, viruses, and Trojans often disguise themselves with similar protection mechanism, anti-virus software often fails to distinguish the protection mechanism of a clean program and the disguise of a malware; this is exactly what is generating the false positive anti-virus detection of our software. Usually, anti-virus software will provide further inspection and false positives feedback mechanism to restore the status of a clean program. To eliminate the false positives, please upgrade the virus database or Trojan to the latest version.

We have checked on each website that tests for viruses online as well as checked with multiple antivirus programs to ensure virus free setup package. Below are Octoparse scanner results of 63 antivirus software. You can also scan it by yourself on https://www.virustotal.com/.

In case of reporting a virus detection by your anti-virus software, you can create an exclusive rule for Octoparse when configuring the antivirus software. And we strongly recommend you download Octoparse from our website. 

If the issue still exists, set up automatic report false positive or contact support@octoparse.com for further assistance. Your security is of utmost importance to us!

In case the installation files are quarantined or removed by the anti-virus software, please try the following steps to restore the software:

1. Uninstall Octoparse and clean up all the installation files.

· Open Octoparse file and select “Uninstall Octoparse”

· Follow through the uninstallation steps.
· Remove all the installation files.

2. Turn off Windows Defender Antivirus temporarily.

· Open Windows Defender Security Center, then select Virus & threat protection > Threat settings. 

· Turn off Real-time protection.

Note: Scheduled scans will continue to run. However, files that are downloaded or installed will not be scanned.

3. Re-install Octoparse (with the defender turned off)

Click Download and unzip the downloaded file