Flare builds blocked by Bitdefender as "Suspicious Activity"

[Richard W]

Hello,

I think this is most likely a problem with Bitdefender rather than Flare but I thought I'd see if anybody else has encountered it.

I have suddenly (since yesterday) become unable to build my Flare projects because Bitdefender abruptly kills the whole process half-way through, citing "suspicious behaviour".

Advanced Threat Control has blocked a process that has been detected as malicious. Process path: C:\Program Files\MadCap Software\MadCap Flare 18\Flare.app\madbuild.exe. Threat name: ATC.SuspiciousBehavior.C70951F1601FF56E.

Followed by:

Advanced Threat Control has started a disinfection action on a process detected as malicious. Process path: C:\Program Files\MadCap Software\MadCap Flare 18\Flare.app

It's doing this to all the projects I've tried. I'm on the latest Flare (2022 r3) and all projects were building fine yesterday - at least one of them hasn't even changed since then.

According to IT, Bitdefender has had a recent update which may be causing it. I haven't investigated further yet.

Anybody else seen this? And if so, managed to fix it?

Thanks,

Richard

[Richard W]

Bitdefender seems to auto-update several times a day, and there doesn't seem to be anything special about the last update - so possibly it's just got a bit overzealous and will fix itself on the next update...!

[Richard W]

IT made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to apply an exception to BitDefender for madbuild.exe. I then managed to solve this by using the "Repair" option on the Flare installation. I assume a file or file registration had become corrupted somehow.

The problem was probably quite specific to me, but if anybody sees anything similar then it's worth trying this, I think.