Avast Free: Virus Chest: Are files here encoded in any way?

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

(First post - I hope this is the right place, as I’m asking about Avast, rather than the virus I had; if not, please be gentle with me).

I had a file that Avast identified as containing the virus W32:Malware-Gen. I let it put this in the Virus Chest.

From here, I submitted it to VirusTotal, where 43 virus checkers, including Avast, pronounced it clean.

So: are files in the Virus Chest encoded such that their virusness is concealed, or should I be mystified by what VirusTotal reported?

I know there is some doubt whether W32:Malware-Gen is real or not, and only Avast reports it, and it’s probably something found by a heuristic rather than a specific signature.

But I had viruslike behaviour on my laptop, which stopped when the offending file was neutralised, so I have every reason to believe that Avast’s report was genuine, and so can’t quite understand VirusTotal’s results.

2

Yes, the files in Chest are certainly encrypted (if you really submitted the file from the Chest folder inside of avast!'s data folder - the file’s name being 00000001 or something similar).
You’d have to extract the file from the Chest somewhere (using the “extract” option - which does the decoding) - and then submit that file to VT.