So I opened a malware virus by accident. Avast acted quickly, but now I notice some strange things. I moved the virus to the vault, disconnected the internet and immediately ran a boot scan. The file was deleted, but I also noticed that an installer archive in the temp folder is now corrupt. Reading around here leads me to believe that nothing is wrong and I can go on as if nothing happened.
I ran another scan while booted up, looked at the results and now find that many files are unable to be scanned. This has not happened before. My question is: is this the virus affecting my PC? Please help!
Also, what is the benefit of keeping the virus in the chest instead of just deleting it?
Being in a temp location means that it is of little value, more so if it is old.
Archive corruption may only be that it can’t be fully extracted so is reported as corrupt, but even so there is little the user can do about a corrupt archive. I would simply suggest clearing your temp folders anyway.
There are many legit reasons why a file can’t be scanned and since you don’t give any examples of the file name, location and reason why it can’t be scanned I can’t speculate on why ?
Deletion isn’t really a good first option (you have none left), ‘first do no harm’ don’t delete, send virus to the chest (a protected area) and investigate.
There is no rush to delete anything from the chest, a protected area where it can do no harm. Anything that you send to the chest you should leave there for a few weeks. If after that time you have suffered no adverse effects from moving these to the chest, scan them again (inside the chest) and if they are still detected as viruses, delete them.
the major thing is how is your system running (nothing strange) as the purpose of the on-access shields is to catch it before it is run.