We have discovered that Symantec's Bloodhound technology uses a heuristic (a guessing scheme) which apparently thinks that the binary results from some of our work units looks like a virus or virus activity, even though it isn't. This seems to occur when a certain pattern of bytes is appended to the output file. We have found one specific reproducible example and are trying to discuss this with Symantec to see if they can adjust their algorithm to not falsely alarm people. Some other products might exhibit similar behavior.

We know of no case where a virus was introduced by World Community Grid. Some people have had their machines infected via other means and sometimes those infections try to attach to files associated with World Community Grid, especially those viruses which look for programs to infect which are running most of the time. Most virus detection programs handle these infections promptly. But, when in doubt, simply rescan your machine per instructions from the virus detection software you have. Do not hesitate to erase the directory for World Community Grid and reinstall a fresh copy if you feel there is any danger. If such an infection has modified something in the World Community Grid files, the agent and servers are designed to protect the rest of the grid from them. Normally the agent will discard such any such modified file and get new work because such a modified file would fail a signature test.