I get this occasionally. I work as a volunteer for a scam detecting and reporting organization. This involves them sending me, in text form, the headers from suspected scam emails. Occasionally Avast blocks my action saying it contains a virus when I try to open one of these attachments. They can’t possibly harbor a virus as it is just text. How can I get around this problem.
Bill in Oz.
Avast Pro. Windows 10, Firefox V45.0.1, Thunderbird 35.7.1
They can't possibly harbor a virus as it is just text.
Yes they can, depends on the text
See example here, a notepad with text (code) in as you can see under the additional tab
https://virustotal.com/en/file/64278f3e7b0c83ebc6345583b85a07c317cdd6a2fcd69e7b4e6c1252d7fce57b/analysis/
What does the warning message from avast say?
what malware name is given?
Thanks for your reply. I don’t recall the exact wording or the virus it thought it had found. Can I find details of previously found problems? I recall previously I was able to look it up in an archive or chest, but can’t find that in the latest version.
Eddie and Pondrus, That test virus link does what it should. However I realized this morning that the email concerned was probably still in trash so I found the attachment in question and tried to open it again here are the two Avast warning messages created:
(I could give you the text of the attachment either here or as a pm if that would help, but won’t without your go-ahead.)
Iam a complete idiot! I can’t give a copy of the attachment as Avast won’t process it. If I try to save it, it says it has put it into New File Attachments, but I can’t find such a file and I doubt it has saved more than the tab off the email anyway. I could of course turn Avast off and get the text downloaded then, but as Avast says it contains a virus I am not prepared to do that.
Thanks for the PMs Pondus. Because of the above I’m not sure where to go from here.