ESO.exe triggering Norton Antivirus warning

WhiteCoatSyndrome · October 2015

I just had Norton Antivirus tell me that ESO.exe was behaving suspiciously. I've played the game for months and this hasn't happened before. Has anyone else run into this?

Leandor · October 2015

You have a particularly violent virus on your computer. It leeches system performance at an alarming rate. It is called "Norton Antivirus". Sadly, this is a particularly nasty species and can only be removed by a complete format/reinstall. In order to prevent that from happening again, I recommend to use either one of: Kaspersky, Sophos, Webroot.

All kidding aside, this is not a confirmed virus signature, but a heuristics result, probably from ESO's server communication behaviour. Try closing the launcher while playing, since that one constantly updates the crown store advertisements - a behaviour that could also be attributed to malicious software trying to connect to a data dump site.

To be totally sure, I recommend to get a stand alone scan tool (available e.g. from f-secure) from a clean machine and put it on a USB stick. Start a scan from that one and check whether it finds something.

Oh yeah, and really get rid of norton, that is the definition of bloatware.

Strongdoctor · October 2015

Leandor wrote: »

You have a particularly violent virus on your computer. It leeches system performance at an alarming rate. It is called "Norton Antivirus". Sadly, this is a particularly nasty species and can only be removed by a complete format/reinstall. In order to prevent that from happening again, I recommend to use either one of: Kaspersky, Sophos, Webroot.

All kidding aside, this is not a confirmed virus signature, but a heuristics result, probably from ESO's server communication behaviour. Try closing the launcher while playing, since that one constantly updates the crown store advertisements - a behaviour that could also be attributed to malicious software trying to connect to a data dump site.

To be totally sure, I recommend to get a stand alone scan tool (available e.g. from f-secure) from a clean machine and put it on a USB stick. Start a scan from that one and check whether it finds something.

Oh yeah, and really get rid of norton, that is the definition of bloatware.

Ah, good old Kaspersky, questionable ties to the Russian government and faking viruses.

If you don't download illegal copyrighted material from obscure uploaders there's little reason to have an active third-party antivirus nowadays.

But yes, Norton is infamous for being crap. No idea about Sophos and Webroot. I can vouch for Avast.