drweblwf.sys driver in EA blacklist
Hello!
I am an official employee of DrWeb Ltd., a developer of antivirus solutions headquartered in Moscow, Russia. Since last fall, our technical support has been receiving numerous reports from users about the impossibility of launching various EA games, and in particular the game Battlefield 2042, in the presence of our antivirus. One of the EA components, most likely the anti-cheat, reports the presence of the drweblwf.sys driver in the system, after which it completely refuses to launch the game with a proposal to disable or remove this driver from the system. The exact error message - "This software cannot be used at the same time as the game. Please make sure it's not running, or restart your PC. (error_number): Dr.Web (drweblwf.sys)". Apparently, our driver was blacklisted by the EA anti-cheat for an unknown reason.
This driver is one of the main drivers of the antivirus and cannot be simply removed from its composition without losing the antivirus functionality. This driver cannot be simply deleted, disabled or suspended. There are various workarounds that allow the user to bypass this problem, for example, temporarily renaming the driver, but none of these ways are acceptable for solving the main problem. Users are forced to either completely remove the antivirus or engage in numerous manual manipulations, losing protection. Or, among other things, refuse EA games, which I have also seen in my practice. In other words, this situation is not beneficial to either company and harms reputation, as well as commercial harm.
The reason I am creating this topic is that I was unable to establish official contact with EA on this issue through any of the channels I was able to find. I have contacted technical support many times with different breaks, but EA technical support, unfortunately, is not competent in solving this problem. Most of the answers were templates, had nothing to do with the question and expressed a complete lack of understanding of the essence of the situation. I also tried to contact the EA PR service and some of the managers directly, but I also didn’t get a response. In my last conversation with EA support, an employee advised me to create a topic in this thread of the EA forum, which is what I am doing.
I don`t think that these issues should be resolved in principle within the framework of technical support and especially in the public area, but apparently EA does not have other known B2B communication channels or a way to establish these communications between managers and developers. This is certainly frustrating, but I do not lose hope that I will find solutions to this problem that will help our users get rid of this problem.
Since most of our users are Russian-speaking, the problem is mainly discussed in the Russian-language branch of the EA forum. In particular, the most popular topic is located here - https://forums.ea.com/discussions/battlefield-2042-ru/не-запускается-игра-ошибка-104-dr-web-drweblwf-sys/7040181
But in reality, our products are distributed all over the world and we have received feedback from our users from different parts of the world(US, IT, FR, BR, etc.) who complain about the impossibility of launching the game in the presence of our antivirus. At that moment, we are talking about hundreds of users who have encountered this problem in one way or another.
The problem is that our company did not take any steps to cause this problem. We do not know the reasons why EA unilaterally adds legitimate drivers of antivirus solutions to its blacklist. But most importantly, we cannot find out these reasons, because we cannot establish any normal communication with the developers or EA managers who could enter into a dialogue with us on this problem.
If EA developers had any complaints about our driver, they could have told us about it so that we could come to a solution together. But apparently, instead, it was decided to simply add the driver to the blacklist.
This whole situation smells very bad. I honestly doubt that creating this thread will help solve this problem, but at least I tried. Maybe for the last time.