Avast found another Evo-gen false positive. I’ve gotten used to that. But this time it deleted the file and did not move it to the Virus Chest. That was really annoying, not able to recover the file for more thorough testing. So I dug out the CD it came from (which was published in 2001) and scanned the original file. It scanned clean, so I tried to copy it to my hard disk, and then Avast reported the suspected virus and would not copy the file.
So I see three problems. In order of increasing severity (in my opinion):
(1) The number of false positives of the Win32:Evo-gen [Susp]. I’ve posed about this before., but I understand that detection algorithms can not be perfect.
(2) A file with a suspected infection being deleted and not moved to the virus chest.
(3) A file that scans clean with an explicit Avast scan (from Windows Explorer menu) but then gets a reported suspected virus when I try copy it or try to run it. What could you possibly detect during a file copy that you could not detect during an explicit scan?