I'd find this very surprising, if true. When I worked for a company that was essentially developing malware, we were able to get ourselves whitelisted by most anti-virus software (either by going through an automated submission process, or outright bribery). The only one who wouldn't budge on principal, no matter what we offered, was Kaspersky. All the others either auto-whitelisted us when we asked or after we paid them. I gained a lot of respect for Kaspersky for that (and lost a lot of respect for the majority of their competitors).