Sitebulb is being blocked by anti-virus

It is not uncommon for Sitebulb to cause conflicts with anti-virus software, normally because of one of these two reasons:

  1. Sitebulb runs its user interface through a framework called Electron, which, for all intents and purposes, is effectively an embedded browser within a desktop app.
  2. Sitebulb's Chrome Crawler utilises Chromium running headlessly (i.e. without a user interface)

Both of these things could reasonably look like they might be for malicious means. In fact, Electron has indeed been used for nefarious means in the past, which has been the root cause of Bitdefender flagging Sitebulb for apparent 'infections' and in the process making Sitebulb completely unusable.

If you've suffered with this, you'll need to follow the steps below to get Sitebulb back up and running.

Current Situation

If you've been running Sitebulb versions earlier than v5.9.3, Bitdefender will have blocked a 'threat' on your machine:

Apparent threat

The truth is there was no threat - it's a false positive. Unless you ignored or circumvented Bitdefender, it will have blocked you from interacting with this file.

Annoyingly, this also means that you can't even uninstall Sitebulb from your machine (because it won't let the installer remove the 'infected' file), and you'll see this error if you try to uninstall OR install a newer version:

Insufficient privileges

So, here's what you need to do:

Step 1: Switch off Bitdefender

Sounds like an extreme measure, but it's the only way to get this done. Don't worry, we'll turn it back on in a minute.

To turn off Bitdefender, find the 'Antivirus' part of the 'Protection Features' and open that up:

Protection Features

Then switch off the Bitdefender Shield:

Turn off Bitdefender Shield

Obviously it won't want you to do this, and once you have it will display red instead of green:

Bitdefender antivirus off

Step 2: Uninstall old Sitebulb

Go to 'Add or Remove Programs', find Sitebulb and uninstall it. You will not lose any existing audit data, promise!

Uninstall Sitebulb

Note: this step will almost definitely make you cry, so keep a box of tissues handy.

We will get through this together.

Step 3: Switch Bitdefender back on

See 'Step 1' above, and just do all the steps but in reverse.

Bitdefender will confirm that 'You are safe' now.

You are safe

Phew.

Step 4: Install new Sitebulb

Go ahead to our Release Notes page to grab the latest update of Sitebulb - as long as the file is v5.9.3 or later, you will be golden.

Download and install Sitebulb, it should now work fine alongside Bitdefender.

Step 5: Rejoice

Maybe pop some bubbles?