Forums General Discussion ZoneAlarm falsely detects mIRC as a virus

Last week my computer was infected by the "Virus Heat" trojan. After dropping Norton and activating antivirus in ZoneAlarm and many emails to ZoneLabs, I am back to normal except that when I try to start mIRC a popup from Zonealarm says "Virus Name: not-a-virus:Client-IRC.Win32.mIRC.631." This may be a fake mimicing ZoneAlarm.

Has anyone else had this experience? I don't believe it to be a real mIRC problem.

No, I know for a fact Kaspersky and others do this too. This is because trojan authors use mIRC as a base for their malicious IRC bots (coded in mIRC scripting of course)

As it states, it is "not-a-virus". ZoneAlarm and other AV programs treat mIRC as a potentially dangerous program and warn you if you have it on your computer. You can disable this in most of those AV programs by either setting the programs to not warn you about those types of things or tells the prorgams to just ignore mIRC and tell you about any other similar programs.

Basically, if you purposely installed mIRC and you did so from a download from this site, you don't have anything to worry about. If you didn't install it and it just suddenly appeared on your computer, it could be that a virus that is set up to use mIRC got onto your computer. That's really all those warnings mean.