What is the official position here? Are we, the customers, supposed to take the chance and liability of disregarding these detections and failed checksums onto our own machines? or should we wait for a new version of SKP? Is there going to be a new version and when if so?
Well, it’s kinda like this, so far no one in the forum has reported a security issue after installing 2023. Will this be fixed, probably. When is a good question, it may be a Microsoft or a SketchUp issue. It is likely neither will say when.
This is my current stance as well. I’m inclined to believe and trust the SU dev team BUT when it comes to internet security, I have a strict no trust policy.
I disagree with the suggestion for any user to ever turn off virus protection, even temporarily.
I just custom scanned the entire “Downloaded Installations” subfolder of SketchUp msi and mst files with Windows Defender (definitions up to date as of today 3-30) on Windows 10.
No threats found.
I have also previously scanned this folder using MalwareBytes and found no issues with these files.
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We are making another attempt to escalate this at Microsoft. I’ll post another update after I have had a conversation with the appropriate team at Microsoft.
Newest information that I have from Microsoft is that similar issues have been seen with a Docker Desktop install. See Windows defender detects a trojan upon installation of 4.17.1 (false positive) · Issue #13335 · docker/for-win · GitHub. It was resolved for many of these users by running updates and then rebooting. They are looking at the Docker case and hopefully the SketchUp case being similar will get extra eyes on it. Stay tuned. We are at least in discussions with Microsoft Security now.
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All malware detectors work by scanning a file for a “signature” pattern or patterns of bytes that the authors believe is sufficient to uniquely identify a particular malware. There is an ongoing battle between malware authors creating ever more sophisticated ways to conceal their methods to break in and security coders building signatures to catch the latest exploits. But it is essentially impossible for the security folks to be certain they have found a signature that won’t trigger on some innocent code. There is simply too much code out there to test all of it for false positives. I suspect that the Microsoft folks are in a situation of “oh ■■■■, that one is flawed! Now what else would work against what it was meant to catch?”
That SketchUp was the innocent victim says nothing about SketchUp.
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In order to provide Microsoft the information that is needed to resolve this false positive, we need a case from a user that they could refer to when investigating. If you feel comfortable enough, you can message me directly with that information by clicking on my avatar. What we need is alert URL that can be found by going to the "Security.microsoft.com " portal which is shown in an attached image.
We had a good conversation with Microsoft’s security team two days ago. They reviewed the SketchUp installer msi and classified it as safe and clean. They applied this to the Microsoft Anti-Virus tool so ideally users should no longer see the security warnings. (They said it would take 24 hrs to be live and it has been over 24 hrs by now.) If you do still see the warnings, please let us know so that we can send this information back to Microsoft.
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Hi ive got a new M2 pro Mac with parallels and im unable to load sketchup on the windows side - have tried updating today it but it’s the same problem…ive got it on Mac but can’t load certain extensions etc as they are windows only. Rather annoying!
Parallels is not a supported environment for SketchUp
https://help.sketchup.com/en/sketchup/system-requirements
If you have a recent Windows 11 build in Parallels, then SketchUp will run, even if it’s not a supported setup.
The problem with Windows 10, if you managed to get that going, is that it doesn’t support 64 bit x86 apps on ARM processor machines.
You could describe the problem you are seeing, it might be one that even real Windows machine users will have seen.
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