false Windows Defender alarm for my custom app

Question

Hi, I developed a small student project many years ago. It is an updater, just an executable, which downloads an ini file. That ini file contains the information, which further files should be downloaded to which local path. I chose VB6 as language, because it runs on pratically every Windows version and does not depend on any .net framework.
As I wrote it, there were already issues with some anti virus software because I initially used the "URLDownloadToFile" API from "urlmon.dll". So I switched to the APIs of "wininet.dll" (InternetReadFile, InternetOpenUrl, InternetOpen, InternetConnect, HttpOpenRequest, HttpSendRequest, HttpQueryInfo, InternetCloseHandle). Back then, that helped. But now my customer has problems with Windows Defender again and asks for a solution. He does not want to add an exception in the Windows Defender settings nor adding a certificate in the certificate store. - What options do I have? How large (in user base) has an application to be, so that Microsoft does add it to the white list? Are there costs for this?

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

Hi,
You can track your submissions through the submission history page.
If you wish to know how the applications are analyzed, please kindly refer to this doc about How Microsoft identifies malware and potentially unwanted applications.
Reference: submission guidelines

Best regards.

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Answer 2

In case it is being detected as a malware and it is incorrect detection, submit sample of the affected file to Microsoft Anti-Malware team as incorrect detection:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/filesubmission