Download refern.

This happens sometimes, and it is a false alarm. Every release is signed, and we scan each one before it ships.

Antivirus programs trust a file more once a lot of people have run it safely. refern is signed with a real certificate, but we are a small studio and our files are still new. Not many people have run them yet, so some scanners get nervous and guess. Nearly every small app gets this on release day, and it settles down as more people download.

If a scanner does flag refern, look closely at the name it gives. You will almost always see a catch-all label like Trojan.Generic or Wacatac. That is what a scanner says when it is guessing. It is not the name of a real virus that anyone has found.

When these come up, we send our installer to the antivirus companies so they can check it themselves. McAfee has already reviewed refern and added it to their safe list.

Two things inside refern do look a little odd to a scanner. We would rather tell you what they are than pretend they are not there.

The first is a small Microsoft add-on called the Visual C++ runtime. Our Windows installer carries a copy and sets it up quietly if your PC does not already have it, because refern crashes right away without it. Scanners watch for installers that run other programs quietly, so this one trips them up.

The second is ffmpeg and ffprobe. These are well known open source tools, and refern uses them to make thumbnails for your videos. They are large files, so they are also the reason the download is as big as it is.

You can go look at all of this yourself. On Windows, refern installs to C:\Users\[your name]\AppData\Local\refern by default. Everything refern ships is sitting right there in that one folder, next to refern.exe: the two video tools, named refern-ffmpeg.exe and refern-ffprobe.exe, plus the Microsoft runtime installer. Nothing is hidden, renamed to look like something else, or scrambled.

Other than that, refern stays on your computer. It only goes online for four things: checking for updates, turning on your license, downloading the optional Auto Tagger, and checking today's date so the free trial cannot be tricked. Your images are never uploaded anywhere.

If your antivirus already deleted the installer, you can restore it and tell your antivirus to skip refern's folder. Reporting it as a false alarm helps too, because that fixes it for everyone else who downloads next.

Still not sure? Ask us in Discord or email jackson@refern.app. Send us your scan report and we will go through it with you.