What are these infected files?

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi

Sometimes when scanning our disks, Avast finds some infected file or files.

1-Is the infected file different than the virus itself?
2-If so, where these infected files come from? Are they our own personal files (our text files for example) which have been infected by a virus?
3-If so, why when we move them to “Chest”, no problem takes place and all of our own files are in their places?

Thanks!

2

By “infected file” it’s probably referring to the virus itself. You can get viruses from anything you install on your system. The internet is one of the most common places to get a virus. When you download something a virus can be hidden within the download then execute itself once it’s on your system. When it does it can install itself anywhere that isn’t protected. Usually in some obscure folder where you’d never think to look for it. But you can get a virus from anything that you install on your computer really.

If avast! falsely detects one of your own clean files as a virus and moves it to the chest you may not notice anything right away, depending on what it is. Everything could be fine until you go to use something and discover everything’s haywire. That’s what’s a real pain in the arse about heuristics. It may be a virus or maybe not. The best policy is when avast! moves something to the chest just leave it there if you’re not sure. If it really is a virus it can do not harm once it’s in the chest, but if it’s not you can always restore it later if you need it.

I don’t know if that answers you questions but maybe it’ll help. :slight_smile:

3

Hi norel,

Thanks for replying!

We can ask the question in this way: We make a Microsoft Word .doc file. After some time a virus infects the .doc files and also the file we have created. We scan our disk with Avast and it finds the infected files:

When we choose “Move to Chest”, does Avast in fact moves our .doc file to the chest? Or it just moves the virus there?

Thanks!

4

From my experience, it has happened this way per my settings:
Avast attempts repair.
If unable to repair, Avast moves infection to vault. This would include whatever infection has attached to.
If your .doc is seen as infected, Avast will move it to the vault to prevent it from being used/spread.
A “repaired” state would indicate that Avast has cleaned the infection. It may be that in cleaning the infection, some parts of a file, (assuming it is an infected file), may become unusable. In that case, repairing file from disk, doing a google search for the file, or simply recreating the file manually or from a known good back up are all ways to complete the task.

5

Hi PapaSmurf,

Thanks! The replies to this post made a good answer!