Hello fellow music enthusiasts! I have been downloading a few VSTs (mostly of the cracked variety from the most reputable teams) from "another" site and have had very good results unzipping and installing for use within live 9.5.

Recently, I also started downloading some VSTs with keygens. However, it seems that pretty much all of these are being flagged by my McAfee AV software as a PUP, all being labelled as "Artemis!" (followed by a 12-digit alphanumeric string) when I do a virus scan on the downloaded files. It definitely seems as though this is usually or always triggered by the keygen, since when I scanned a few 2-part rars, Artemis! was only detected (and subsequently quarantined by me) in the first of the 2 rar files, which is where i would assume the keygen file resides.

Through googling Artemis!, it seems that this is a frequent false positive with McAfee AV SW but am wondering if there is any way to tell for sure if this is a destructive file. I don't think it is recommended to install and run another AV (such as AVG Free, etc) along with McAfee, so not real sure what other options there are. I'm sure many veterans have encountered this issue, so I would be very happy to hear some of your best known methods of dealing with this issue.

Thanks!

 

Most PUPS are potential unwanted programs and in the big scheme are the least of things to worry about. If i understand things correctly, if you trust the teams that are putting these out, I never worry about pup or keygen hits on software I know is k'd from trusted sources. If worried, you could always run in Sandbox or other such software that contains the program away from your main stuff. Most keygens naturally trigger alerts in most anti-virus software,patches not so much. It is a function of the software/packaging that groups use. If I'm wrong about this, I invite more knowledgeable people to correct me or expand on what's actually going on.