False positive for downloading Excel spreadsheet

[hPdnV2h]

Hi, I have an academic site publicly hosted on GitHub along with downloadable files or tools. One such file is an Excel spreadsheet for tracking time spent working. For some reason my Malwarebytes extension is blocking the file download. It didn't do this before, and I recently had my student club promote it, so of course I would like for it not to be blocked by my peers trying to download it.

It says it blocked it because it is suspicious because it has low traffic (see screenshot). This is a new site and also an academic site so I suppose this is normal.

The URL is: https://remi-theriault.com/work-tracker.xlsx

Let me know if you need any additional information. Thank you!

[hPdnV2h]

Edit: from https://ipinfo.info/html/ip_checker.php

Quote

 

IP Address Check
IP-Address from DNS Host Lookup: 68.183.27.198

 

Edit: Doesn't seem to be possible to edit, so here's a reply instead!

[gonzo]

The site has been whitelisted. Please allow 15-30 minutes for changes to take effect. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The reason it was blocked it because Microsoft Office files (DOC/DOCX/XLS/XLSX/PPT/PPTX) are favorites of the bad guys for injecting malware into, and once the unsuspecting user runs them (always trusting macros, because that's what unsuspecting users do), they get infected.

[hPdnV2h]

Cool, thanks so much! Yeah no macros in my file, just a really simple spreadsheet! Best,

[gonzo]

The catch is that if your download was intercepted, there might be a macro or six in it by the time your user got to it.  That's why we block!

[hPdnV2h]

Yeah I see, so it's much safer to block first because we don't know if it contains macros at the time that it is being blocked. Nevertheless, thanks for checking and unblocking it!