Rotate - Is Rotate a virus?

Question

Accepted Answer

NO, Rotate is not a virus. Its a joke or prank program intended to entertainment purposes only. It is NOT malware, adware, spyware, rootkit, trojan, keylogger, botnet, backdoor software, balvertising, scareware, phishing, hijacker, trojans or ransomware. NO NO NO!

Antivirus is essential tool that most people need to protect their Windows operating system from Viruses, Trojans, and other bad stuff.
Unfortunately, most Antivirus companies goes too far with their Virus/Trojan protection, and in many times they classify completely legit software as Virus/Trojan infection.

The definition of a virus is an unwanted computer program that was written to purposely damage computer systems or replicate itself. A virus is usually manifested by a destructive or disruptive effect on the executable program that it affects. Rotate is not a virus!. Rotate does no harm, does no damage and is not destructive.  Rotate might be disruptive to the victim you play the prank on, but that is the intention of a joke or prank. Rotate is simply a fun gag program that is completely harmless.  We would not be in business for 35+ years if we created viruses. We will challenge any anti-virus company that claims our software is a virus and causes damage to computer systems.

Antivirus programs, Extensions, and other tools do not provide clear explanation about the alerts they display and many people are confused, thinking that our software is infected with Virus/Trojan, and As long as there are users who think that our programs are infected, we consider it as a "False Positive". The right definition of "False Positive", in our opinion, is a situation that a user thinks a file is infected with a Trojan/Virus/Malware according to an alert displayed by Antivirus software, while the file is not infected at all.

It doesn't really matter that the Antivirus developers only wanted to warn the user about a software that can be used by prankster, if the Antivirus program doesn't deliver the message to the end user correctly, then it's still a false positive.

It's important to say that some of the Antivirus programs imply that our software is not a Virus by adding "not-a-virus" or "Hacktool" or "Riskware" strings to the alert name, but many users don't understand the meaning of these strings and still think that the file is infected.

Read this FAQ to see our response to major anti-virus vendors flagging our software is a "virus". You need to look closely at your anti-virus vendor and see what they are detecting our software as. Below you will find information about Norton AntiVirus and other vendors responses to our inquiries.

After a full system scan in Norton AntiVirus we noticed the following screen appearing show us that we had an "infection". This screen shows our Fake Format utility, but it is the same screen that appears for all of our joke software.

After looking closely at the "risk" of the software you will see the RISK TYPE of "Joke program". It states "A program that alters or interrupts the normal behavior of your computer, creating a general distraction or nuisance". This sounds to us that a "Joke program" is not a virus.
Reviewing the help for the security risk of these "joke programs", below you will see the text:

Inside of Norton (all anti-virus vendors include this option) you can set the Security Risk Categories for your anti-virus scan. If you UN-check the option for Joke Programs our software will not appear in the anti-virus scan (see below)

Below is an email that we have received from a Sr Virus Support Analyst at McAfee AntiVirus Software:

> The files were downloaded and scanned by VirusScan. The detections
> identified the files as joke programs and not viruses:
> 
> Scanning for 46882 viruses, trojans and variants.
> 03/13/2005  14:49:11
> Options:
> C:\INF /SUB /!GURU /REPORT C:\INF\SCAN4025.TXT
> 
> C:\INF\FAKE\FAKE_DEL.EXE ... is a joke called Fake-Del.
> C:\INF\FAKE\FAKEFMT.EXE ... is a joke called Fake-Format.
> 
> It is because of the shock value that we received the programs with request
> to add them for detection as joke programs. Only if a user uses the command
> line switch with /!GURU will our software detect the files as joke programs.
> 
> Additionally if the /NOJOKE switch is used, customers of VirusScan can still
> use the /!GURU switch but not detect joke programs.
> 
> Regards, 
> 
> Patrick Nolan
> Sr Virus Support Analyst

As with any anti-virus or anti-spyware software, you can choose the option to NOT include "joke" programs in its detection.
This will prevent harmless joke programs from appearing to be viruses or spyware.

Rotate nor any of the software we create are viruses.

The guys over at NirSoft are also feeling the pain of the big anti-virus companies going too far with "anti-virus" protection. We encourage you to read this blog posting for some good information regarding this topic. We feel their pain!

FAQ for Rotate v1.00

Is Rotate a virus?