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Dodgy Windows Service?

God
Grafter
Posts: 1,112
Registered: ‎30-07-2007

Dodgy Windows Service?

WinPatrol just flagged a new service starting up on my vista box “SCM_Service” / “WinService.exe”. Googling both of these turns up very little on one and questionable paranoia on the other.
They / it appeared after I installed drivers for a Netgear USB wireless adapter (sigh- had to move my box out of wire range). My feeling is that they are OK and Netgear related, I have scanned the driver install program and it shows as ok.
But... My PC paranoia says firstly why doesn’t WinPatrol have details of the file if it is Netgear and secondly why is there no Netgear related Google results. A full Avast scan of my C drive has produced nothing. Can anyone throw any light on the subject?
1 REPLY 1
7up
Community Veteran
Posts: 15,828
Thanks: 1,583
Fixes: 17
Registered: ‎01-08-2007

Re: Dodgy Windows Service?

It isn't unusual for genuine software to sometimes be flagged up as suspicious. I once installed the Demo of Borlands Delphi 4 (might of been v3 actually). McAfee instantly flagged it up as having a virus - simply because it had found the TServer demo program which demonstated how to use a TServer component for socket programming.
I had some very heated emails with borland about that, and eventually they took it further with McAfee. It's never happened again.
Even realplayer was showing up sometimes as being spyware. Admittedly it actually was, but it was harmless and it was known as being a very popular media player which was harmless. Still people grumbled about it being a major security risk (because it gathered annonymous statistics). Real player doesn't seem to be such a big hit these days since the AV companies and their counterpart spyware pals did their best to destroy reals reputation.
With regards to finding no info online, no news is good news. I'm sure if it was a dodgy program, it would of shown up all over the place on google as being of dodgy creation. Remember if it's bad, people are far better at shouting about it to alert others.
That doesn't mean it's nothing to worry about, it could be something new which hasn't been found yet (unlikely as most AV companies actively hunt for new threats). If it requires internet access, block it. Just in case.
If you still don't find anything worrying in a week or so, I personally woudn't worry about it too much (though I'd still keep it's iinternet access restricted personally).
Good luck
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