Known issues when using Kaspersky products

Problem Description

Parallel use of the Social Network Harvester and Kaspersky's security suites can cause problems that can lead to the inoperability of the SNH.

These Kaspersky products are affected

• Kaspersky Premium
• Kaspersky Plus
• Kaspersky Standard
• Kaspersky Small Office Security
• Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud
• Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud Plus

How does the problem affect you?

The Social Network Harvester no longer recognizes target profiles in the browser explorer. Also, no more collection tasks are possible. The profile manager cannot be used either.

What is causing the problem?

The SNH regularly updates the data collection modules from Freezingdata servers. The update is performed when the SNH is started. An update window with a progress bar is displayed to the user.

During the update, an archive file that was previously downloaded is unzipped to the SNH user directory C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\SocialNetworkHarvester\Python\site-packages.

If a Kaspersky product is installed, some files stored during the extraction process may be incorrectly identified as suspicious by the security software and removed immediately. As a result, the SNH no longer has any data collection modules at its disposal.

Suggested solutions

Setting the SNH as an exception in Kaspersky.

Tell the Kaspersky software suite that the SNH is trustworthy software. You can read about the exact procedure here https://www.kaspersky.de/blog/how-to-add-apps-to-exclusions/27385/

Manual module update of the SNH

If adding an exception to the Kaspersky software fails, you can install the data collection modules manually.

1. Close the SNH Software
2. Open this URL in your browser:
    https://update.socialnetworkharvester.com/modules/SNH2_modulinfo.json
    The JSON document that is now displayed contains the information on the latest data collection modules.
    
3. Download the file under "download".
4. Unpack the downloaded ZIP file to
    C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\SocialNetworkHarvester\Python\site-packages
5. Restart SNH
6. The data collection modules should now appear.

This process must be repeated with the next automatic update of the modules.