How to stop anti-virus software from blocking Octoparse?

The latest version for this tutorial is available here. Go to have a check now!

Octoparse may sometimes be falsely reported as a virus by anti-virus software on your computer.

When it’s marked as a virus, it may result in:

1. Octoparse closes itself in a few minutes after you launch it.

2. No response when you run your task with “Local Extraction”.

3. You may receive a trial expiration error and cannot run Octoparse.

Why is Octoparse reported as a virus? Does it really have a virus?

We, the Octoparse Team would like to reassure you that there is NO malicious malware hidden in the files of our program and that your malware detection is a simple consequence of our protective mechanism being unidentified by anti-virus software.

Octoparse needs to access the Internet to browse a website and interact with the website on its own to extract data. Anti-virus software doesn't like software that accesses the Internet since viruses will often access the Internet to expose your private information. Therefore, it will often try to block the Internet access and may even quarantine or remove some Octoparse files.

It is known as a false positive when an antivirus software falsely flags safe software. False positives, which are a known problem in the antivirus industry, may still occur even we work with the software provider prevent Octoparse from being incorrectly flagged.

How do I fix it?

Usually, you can add Octoparse to the whitelist of your virus blocker software (also called adding an exclusion). If your antivirus program has already quarantined Octoparse, you may need to remove it from quarantine before or after adding it as an exception.

It would be better to re-install Octoparse after you whitelist it in the antivirus software in case some files may have been deleted.