A short time after my computer booted up tonight, Norton was looking at something. It turned out to be Heur.AdvML.B in Syberia 2 game.exe and it says the game.exe has been removed.

The game is from Steam but I can't even tell you how long ago I downloaded it, probably over a year ago.

Any thoughts on this? I googled it but would welcome you input please.

Thanks.

Norton may not have actually removed the file, just quarantined it. I don't use Norton because it does things like this, so I'm not sure. You may check your quarantine files and see if it's there. If it is, you may be able to restore it.

If the game was downloaded from Steam, you can always go to your library and redownload it. I've done that before with a couple of games.

In one place it says quarantined and in another it says removed. It does say I can restore and exclude it though. How do I know if it is safe to do that? Why would it happen after all this time?

In my Steam library it shows ready to play or uninstall. I guess I can uninstall it and reinstall it. I'm still not ready to play it yet anyway.

Then go ahead and restore and exclude. Norton is famous for false positives. Who knows why it did that. Steam won't know that Norton did this, so that's all it will say. Go ahead and restore and then make sure you exclude it or Norton will just do this again.

Norton is guessing.

https://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2016-051811-2400-99&tabid=2

OK. Thank you Draclvr and Jenny100!

"Norton is famous for false positives."

I'd rather have it that way than not - and be safe and not sorry.

It's easy enough with Norton to take stuff out of Quarantine if you know it to be safe.

I just find it to be too bossy!

I'm with Mad on this. My problem is knowing whether something is false positive or not. It hasn't bossed me around too much.

So, did you get the game back up? You might try starting a game just to be sure it works now.

Nah, I didn't try the game. Probably some day way off in the future I'll try to play it and it won't work and I'll be posting here wondering why.

OK, I went in the game and it opened up to the main menu. I didn't try to play it though.

Thanks!!

Good... now it can just sit there and wait for you to come back and play it!

It has plenty of company. I have downloaded a lot of games that I want to play right now but you know that doesn't work. I'm replaying Still Life right now. I probably downloaded it the same time as Syberia.

I don't find Norton "bossy"

For techie dumbos like me, the assurance that Norton knows what it's doing is a comfort !!

Kaspersky certainly has a way of doing this too, and I think so does McAfee. And yes, it's based on heuristics, i.e. educated guessing, not lists of certified evil stuff. It can be very annoying, as we've seen in other conversations we had about installing games.

But also more recent versions of Microsoft will simply refuse to install lots of older applications, simply saying it's unsuitable, and changing the administrative rights or compatibilities won't help you out either. I don't know if this is based on definite lists of items or some sort of mechanism to detect, let's say, obsolete versions of Direct X.

Best,

Rich

So far, I've not had any problems installing older applications on Windows 10. I'm running an ancient version of Microsoft Money on one person's Windows 10. Older disk games have been a real problem since they started blocking certain forms of DRM.

Even though I did the "restore and exclude" it did it again today.

That's why I call it bossy... Maybe see if there is another place you can tell Norton to exclude this file?

What version of Norton do you have, oldbroad ??

I have what's now simply called "Norton Internet Security".

If something I download is queried/quarantined, I just go to the quarantine screen and once there can choose to "Trust" it or "Condemn" it.

If I choose Trust, the trust then becomes permanent so I'm never asked again.

I don't know. I can't find a version number but under quarantined it just has restore or other options. When restored/excluded the first time I was somewhere else (not under quarantined). The second time I did it from there, so I'll see what happens. When I had googled this it did show OOP, it's checking it again right now!!!

As I started saying, when I had googled this I saw that a lot of Steam users were having this problem at one time or another. Yea, it quarantined it again just now. I am not going to worry about it anymore for now as I am not ready to play the game. I also have the game from GOG so can try it from there if need be. Or the disc.

This weekend I am going to run a full Norton and some other scans. I'm actually a little worried there might be something because yesterday while the game was quarantined I clicked on it through my Steam library and it said something about a recent update, some advent calendar or something. I don't know what that was. The Steam page does not show any update. Just now I clicked on it and it has 2 circles, one that says "Play Syberia 2" and one that says "Launcher when Japanese version has been selected" (different from yesterday). If I click to play an error occurs because the .exe is missing.

I forgot about the "Steam" aspect, oldbroad.
As I don't use Steam myself any more, and haven't for some time now, I probably shouldn't have tried to offer help.
I hope you get sorted, though.
I'm so sorry

However, I DO like Norton. I've used it on every machine I've ever had and feel confident about it.

[And considering I've never had a virus or malware get on any of my machines ever, it has proved it's worth as far as I'm concerned ]

Mad, I always appreciate any help I might get, and I also have always had Norton. I like it too!