Infected by Trojan Virus

Hello, we’re trying to get to the bottom of this, as there have been multiple reports by users with AVG. To prevent any unnecessary panic, here’s an initial response; Please refrain from posting new threads, let’s keep this topic to one conversation to avoid confusion.

At first glance, this is looking highly likely to be a false positive, but we take any security threats seriously and are doing a thorough review. Meantime, I’ll provide some information about why it’s likely a false-positive, what you can do right now to double-check.

First Step – Please Provide Feedback!

There is more information you can provide us – please provide it directly to our contact form. If you can provide the following, that’d certainly be helpful in us investigating it further and (most likely) reporting this false positive to AVG:

• Detection name
• Alert ID
• File URL
• Additionally, any extra info you may be seeing giving context to the infection

What we’re doing about this

Firstly, you can see any commits made to the SVN repo here. This shows a full history of what changes are made to Events Manager, all changes are applied to the trunk folder, and when we tag versions. We run a direct copy of the SVN repo onto itself (i.e. we copy content from plugins.svn.www.ads-software.com from one folder to another), so nothing new is uploaded to the tags folder but copied from trunk. We can safely assume what is in the tags folder is unaltered from the trunk folder. For example, this is how we commit a tag version:

svn cp "https://plugins.svn.www.ads-software.com/events-manager/trunk/" "https://plugins.svn.www.ads-software.com/events-manager/tags/x.x.x" -m "tagging x.x.x"

You can therefore also check and compare what has changed between versions, here is a comparison between the latest commit and three months ago (here is a same comparison, just trunk folder). The files of interest are near the bottom, the ones with trunk/includes/js/events-manager… pattern. You can compare the changes between versions, and comparing the main JS file I don’t see any malicious code injected there at all.

The issue with the .min.js file is it’s very hard to compare changes because this file is a minified version of the JS file, so right now we’re going to re-minify our current JS file (which has the changes above) and see if there any difference between what’s on the .org repo and what we reproduce. If there is a difference, we’ll look into what that may be, if not then it’s definitely a false positive.

What you can do about it

Meanwhile, there is something you can do immediately, which is to force EM to load the .js file, which we know is safe (assuming your files have not been altered on your server). To do this, add the following line to your wp-config.php file:

define('EM_DEBUG', true);

The difference in filesize is about 100kb, so in terms of performance there is not much of a tradeoff whilst we double-check this. I’d be interested to know if your AVG still flags that JS file.

Hi Marcus,

Thank you for issuing some info on this so quickly. We’ve implemented the define('EM_DEBUG', true); in our site’s wp-config.php file and Avast is still flagging ‘/wp-content/plugins/events-manager/includes/js/events-manager.min.js’ as: Script:SNH-gen [Trj] on all of our computers in our office.

Please let us know if there are any other temporary fixes that we can try. Thank you.

• This reply was modified 4 months, 3 weeks ago by Wes Butler.

Update

This is a 99.999% definitely a false positive. We have regenerated the minified file based on the 6.9.8 update source JS file and it matches exactly with the one uploaded to www.ads-software.com.

We are doing a couple of extra checks just to be 100% sure and will even provide a tool for comparing your own JS URL with a “valid” JS file, so you can ensure your specific JS file wasn’t altered either.

@wesb2023 You may need to clear your cache also, after you add that line the .min.js file shouldn’t be loaded anymore, so there’s no reason for Avast to flag it.

Anyone reading, I’d be interested to know if this is Windows-specific or Avast-wide. I have Avast on my mac, it doesn’t flag anything, so I’m suspecting it’s Windows-specific.

Flags in AVG on my Windows 11 pc

We’ve just managed to reproduce this ourselves on a Windows machine. Please bear with us, hopefully we’ll have a solution.

This is a false positive, 100%. It’s happening on our demo site too when we visit it on a Windows Avast-enabled machine.

We’re going to see what we can do to change our code so that Avast isn’t thinking it’s a virus, in some way or another. We’ll get back to you very shortly, most likely with an update that ‘fixes’ the false positive, which will likely be faster than getting Avast to correct their mistake.

Hello, we’ve just updated to 6.4.10, essentially, it just does the same as adding that line of EM_DEBUG.

We’d appreciate any confirmations of this being fixed for you. We will follow up with an update to our post about this issue.

We also added the option to select whether to load a minified JS or CSS file in the Settings > General > Performance Optimization. By default the JS will load unmodified files for now, with a warning about Avast.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience, thanks for your patience! This was totally out of our hands in terms of preventing the problem. We’re going to contact AVAST about this and file a false-positive report.

If anyone would like to report to avast as well, you can do so here, you’ll need the detection name, which is Script:SNH-jen[Trj] and the Alert ID would be what you see at the bottom of your alert, like in this screenshot. As for a description, you could paste this:

We are receiving false positive alerts for a minified JS file which has been verified as clean by the authors. Loading the unmodified version resolves the issue but has caused a lot of confusion for site visitors.

More information in the following links:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/infected-by-trojan-virus/#post-17866434
https://wp-events-plugin.com/blog/2024/07/03/false-positive-avast-anti-virus-security-threats/

• This reply was modified 4 months, 3 weeks ago by Marcus. Reason: corrected link newline typo

Thank you. 6.4.10 fixed the issue for me. I use Avast on Windows 10.

Yup – also good here with 6.4.10. Thanks for sorting so quickly. Most appreciated.

Thanks so far for confirming!

Have flagged with Avast as well.

Appreciate the quick update. Update 6.4.10 is working well for us here. We’ve filed a false positive report with Avast as well.

Thanks everyone for confirming, your patience and persistence!

Far from an ideal way to spend the day, but glad it’s resolved in the end ??