Yesterday an Avast scan told me the computer was infected with “Win32: Trojan-gen. (Other)”
I moved the file to Quarantine, and I emailed the file to Avast earlier today. On the advice of a knowledgable security person I also was going to send the file to the security firm “Virus Total”, which will analyze it and report the results back to you, but there seemed to be no way to do this without restoring the file to its original location in C:\Windows\System (and then moving back to Quarantine). Is this a correct assumption on my part? Is it dangerous to do this? If so, is there another method that I overlooked that would allow me to email the file to someone else besides Avast?
By the way, I downloaded and ran TM SysClean and posted to HiJack this. I don’t think I’m infected anymore but waiting for a reply to see if everything has been cleaned up.
Yes and no. You can’t send files in Chest to anywhere besides Alwil. This is logical: for security reasons, the file can’t escape from the Chest.
Yes, it’s very dangerous. Why don’t you just use the ‘Extract’ buttom and send the file to a floppy, for instance. From there you can ask for virus total analysis.
I figured that temporarily restoring it wasn’t a very good idea, thanks for the confirmation. What’s interesting is that on their website, http://www.virustotal.com/flash/index_en.html , Virus Total does actually suggest regular email (as a second choice) as one way to deliver an infected file to them for analysis. For end users, and maybe even some IT types, who don’t deal with this kind of situation on a regular basis, this sounds like asking for trouble. Thanks again.
You can send an email with the file (false positive or infected) to: virus@avast.com
You can zip and password the files… Inform a link to this thread and the password used.