Leythos wrote:

> That may be true, but the same would be true for exe files. The chance
> of a false alarm is minimal in todays world of quality AV scanners. In
> the 7 years we've had Symantec Corp edition set to scan ALL files on
> access we've never seen a false hit.

It's actually harder to accidently flag a good exe as a bad one, then
it would be to accidently hueristically determine some .txt file is a
virus. This isn't from personal opinion, thats a stated fact in the
antivirus industry. While I appreciate improvements have been made, the
underlying principles of how a virus scanner works has not changed much
in the last few years.

For example, frisk; maker of f-prot, has an option on the dos scanner
to indeed, scan all files. This is settable via the "/dumb" switch. He
named it dumb, because scanning all files on a hard disk, even ones
that cannot possibly contain executable code, is a dumb thing to do.

As I said, I've been in the vx side for many years. I'm well versed on
both aspects of it, from antivirus perspective as well as vx
perspective. I'm not giving my opinion per say, I'm giving that of the
general consensus of both the Av and Vx side of things.

Regards,
Dustin Cook