Threat Detected => What to Do?

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

See attachment. Scan results show Threat Detected. Cannot get details or info on the threat. No file found. What to do?

2

Its a bug … posted many times

3

Just go to Scan History and you should see the scan shows “No Virus Found”.
As stated, this is bug that goes back to 2014/V9 as well.

4

Thanks for the replies. Had no idea this might be a bug.

5

This does need to be fixed - we rely on our anti-virus to find things and when it reports a threat when there was none then users may go off and do possibly damaging things thinking something bad is going on. Grrrrrr…

6

You’ve left the asterisk before the name when you entered the name of the report file for the particular scan (“avast scans”).
The program “fixed” the name (as it’s not possible to create a file containing an asterisk character in its name) and created the report called “_avast scans” instead. However, the UI doesn’t perform the same “fix” when you click the “Show report file” button - which results in the following error.
If you remove the asterisk from the report name (in the settings of the corresponding scan) and re-run, it will start working.

7

igor, I think the real issue here is that Avast is screaming “Threat Detected” when no threat was detected. The issue of not finding the report file is really secondary.

I checked my scan settings and the report file for my Quick and Full scans was merely an “*”. In my case report files were being created with the names “Full System Scan.txt” and “Quick scan.txt”. Evidently Avast had made up these names. When the false “Threat Detected” was reported, the “Show Results” button did nothing (no error, nothing). However the link to “Show Report File” did show the report file associated with the scan type and the report indicated a successful scan with no infected files.

This is quite a confusing situation for the user and it was just about to lead me on a journey to see if my PC was infected with something. Luckily I decided to check this support forum and learned that the error is a known, unfixed, bug.

– Larry