[R] R is a virus, spyware or malware (gasp!)

[Tony Plate]

And the installed Rgui.exe in 2.6.2 is 10240 bytes, which is 
their "most common file size."

They also say (fill in your own comments...):

 > RGUI.EXE has been seen to perform the following behavior(s):
 >
 >     * Can communicate with other computer systems using 
HTTP protocols
 >     * This Process Creates Other Processes On Disk
 >     * This Process Deletes Other Processes From Disk
 >     * Executes a Process
 >     * The Process is packed and/or encrypted using a 
software packing process
 >     * Accesses the MS Outlook Address Book

and

 > What you should do about RGUI.EXE:
 >
 > Check Your PC Now
 > The most common objects with the name of RGUI.EXE have 
yet to be classified as safe by our research department.

So, I suspect that they don't actually classify it as a 
virus, they just haven't classified it as safe...  (I 
couldn't see any email contact address on their web page.)

-- Tony Plate


Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> Ioannis Dimakos wrote:
>> Of course it's a virus.  Once you catch the virus, you feel this rush,
>> this fever to abandon all other statistical packages.
>>
>> On a more serious note, though, the size of the RGUI.exe file as reported
>> in the webpage is not even near close to the actual size of the R
>> distribution exe pack.
>>   
> Hmm, the installed Rgui.exe in 2.7.0rc (which is all I have, under Wine 
> on a Fedora machine) appears to be 27648 bytes, which is one of the 
> cited numbers.
> 
> Presumably something needs to be done...
> 
> 
>> I
>>
>> ====
>> On Sun, May 18, 2008 17:30, Philippe Grosjean wrote:
>>  
>>> After a search session in Google, I found this page:
>>> http://www.prevx.com/filenames/X1993788672854780728-0/RGUI.EXE.html
>>> which classifies Rgui.exe (clearly stated as "R for Windows GUI
>>> front-end") in a database of virus, spyware and malware!
>>>
>>> No comments!
>>>
>>> Philippe Grosjean
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>>
>>>     
>>
>>
>>   
> 
>