My Experience with DJI After 2 years

Roy Rogers · Jan 25, 2020

If anyone is interested this is my experience with DJI .
Good to great for 2 years , but I found a problem with a produced and reported it .

after not getting a response for a time felt obligated to let people know.
Heavy Wind The Mavic Mini's Achilles Heel You can read here I wasn't Malicious .
3 Days later I got this ...

~~~

~~~Followed by

I took my PC to a computer expert this same day . He kept it for 5 days checking it out and determined My copy of DJI assistant 2 was a Trojan ! When I Down Loaded it from the DJI Site I Got Redirected to a site called drones4life.com ( A Site that doesn't Exist ) . I tried over and over to communicate with DJI , but got Black Balled ( Social score downgraded ) and dismissed . Over n Over n Over . If anyone is really interested I have saved all emails and PMs with DJI .
I have asked the FBI to Look into it . DJI is a Chinese company pretending they are not . I'm just going to leave it at that and not get into the national security issues IF they can do all this.

A collection of items I've bought from them over the years so you can see it's not like I am sponsored by a competitor . I was a huge supported of DJI but no More.

Thanks For Reading
RR

Not A Speck Of Cereal · Jan 25, 2020

"DJI is a Chinese company pretending they are not "

What does this even mean?

I agree that DJI should take you seriously, re: the trojan in their own EXE downloaded from their site. If you got black-balled in their forums or in email, I wonder if you contributed to that (language?) because as someone that has been in the service industry, that can shut someone down straight off.

But either way (even if you didn't contribute to the reasons for you being blocked), you should move to a phone call (I didn't notice that mentioned above -- apologies if it was).

Btw: my Mavic 2 Pro (not Mini) is also not designed to fly in high winds. My owners manual states not flying in rain or wind. The specifications has a wind speed resistance spec of 29-30 KPH. Does your Mini not have this in the specifications?

Johnmcl7 · Jan 25, 2020

DJI's assistant software has been regularly generating false positives from different AV clients, I received the same warning and noticed DJI have changed the file. This is the first one:

VirusTotal

www.virustotal.com

And this is the second and current one:

VirusTotal

www.virustotal.com

I can't find any actual malware though, this is a one off installer so if it was to deploy malware it would have to install something with the malware in it. The Assistant software doesn't run in the background so it would need something else if it was to run a keylogger but the AV software doesn't detect anything like that and I can't find any such software. The change in the executable is concerning although even the first one is not flagged as malware by most security software.

I'm not defending DJI's response which even if it is a false positive is something they should be dealing with.

Deleted member 114292 · Jan 26, 2020

No it’s something the AV vendor needs to deal with. I’ve worked in the industry and false positives are the fault of the AV engine.
Normally in a case like this you report which AV is flagging it.

Roy Rogers · Jan 29, 2020

Not A Speck Of Cereal said:
"DJI is a Chinese company pretending they are not "

What does this even mean?

I agree that DJI should take you seriously, re: the trojan in their own EXE downloaded from their site. If you got black-balled in their forums or in email, I wonder if you contributed to that (language?) because as someone that has been in the service industry, that can shut someone down straight off.

But either way (even if you didn't contribute to the reasons for you being blocked), you should move to a phone call (I didn't notice that mentioned above -- apologies if it was).

Btw: my Mavic 2 Pro (not Mini) is also not designed to fly in high winds. My owners manual states not flying in rain or wind. The specifications has a wind speed resistance spec of 29-30 KPH. Does your Mini not have this in the specifications?

Easy to see where your interest lays . Whos buttering your bread NASOC ?
Please note I didn't ask DJI to do anything other then address there own possible defects / problems .

syzygos7 · Jan 29, 2020

I had this in the past but after it they updated the assistance for mavic I was able to install.

ThorDar · Feb 3, 2020

"When I Down Loaded it from the DJI Site I Got Redirected to a site called drones4life.com..."

Do you mean when you clicked on the download link on the Dji site, you were redirected to this site for the download?

Johnmcl7 · Feb 3, 2020

Done said:
No it’s something the AV vendor needs to deal with. I’ve worked in the industry and false positives are the fault of the AV engine.
Normally in a case like this you report which AV is flagging it.

Yes and no, the fact DJI's assistant software has been doing this regularly with most of the AV vendors suggest there is something wrong on DJI's side. False positives are a problem with AV vendors on legitimate software but I've not seen any other software report so many false positives over a long period of time. It's also worth nothing that in this case it's DJI that changed their software not the AV vendors four of whom still flag up the original executable as containing a trojan, DJI have replaced it with a different executable that doesn't show any detections.

Deleted member 114292 · Feb 3, 2020

It was my understanding that there was never any real malware in the exe.
Yes?
Also, I never had Norton flag it.
\

Johnmcl7 · Feb 3, 2020

Done said:
It was my understanding that there was never any real malware in the exe.
Yes?
Also, I never had Norton flag it.
\

It doesn't look like there is malware in this exe and although Norton didn't flag it this time, they have flagged the Assistant software as malware in the past:

WARNING: Virus in DJI Assistant 2 download

WARNING: Virus on board DJI Assistant 2 download from DJI I downloaded DJI Assistant 2 from DJI this morning, and installed it. It did what I expected it to do (I've used it on another computer before). This evening, Norton Security caught a very serious virus hiding within a file named...

forum.dji.com

I don't think there's ever been any real malware in the DJI Assistant software but it appears the way DJI are handling their code is not right, I've never come across any software which keeps getting flagged as a false positive (and other issues, they were completely blocked from running on Windows 10 at one point before this) over several years. Your assertion that it's the AV vendors that need to sort this would likely be correct for a one off false positive from one company but not when it's multiple companies flagging it over the course of several years and the AV vendors have not changed anything since the original exe is still being flagged up as a trojan by multiple AV companies and it's DJI that have quietly changed their exe.