Why does my anti-virus software detect threats?

Awesome Miner doesn’t contain any virus, trojan or spyware. The software has been on the market since 2014 and has a very good reputation.

All Awesome Miner executables are digitally signed with a certificate and passes the Microsoft SmartScreen filters thanks to the good reputation. Note on May 2021: We updated our certificates and you may see a SmartScreen warning for the next month before the new certificate builds reputation.

Every new Awesome Miner release is scanned with anti-virus software both locally and via online scanning tools using more than 60 popular anti-virus engines. Awesome Miner has never included or been infected by any virus or trojan.

As with any Windows based application, anti-virus software can sometimes give false warnings. The general recommendation is to report this to the anti-virus vendor to have them correct it in their next virus definition update.

In general, anti-virus software are very sensitive to software related to mining. The reason is that malware is often running mining software in the background to make money for the malware author. This is the reason why the mining software automatically downloaded by Awesome Miner should be excluded from the virus scanning. See the guide for Configure Exclusions in Windows Defender for more detail.

Some anti-virus software also puts a warning flag on all software that are related to mining – in some cases even Awesome Miner although Awesome Miner itself isn’t doing any mining. This warning flag isn’t stating that the software is a threat but simply inform that it’s related to mining. The warning flag might indicate this with texts like “CoinMiner”, “Cryptocoin miner” or “Bitcoin miner”. If you are running mining operations and mining software, these texts are an accurate description of the purpose of the software you are running and can safely be ignored. However, if you downloaded a game or word processor and it’s being flagged as software related to mining – you should take the warning more seriously.