Can archives be infected by malwares?

I was going over scan settings and realized that I could set my AV to skip archives. Can archives be infected by malwares? Is it secure to set my av to skip archives during scanning?

 

Of course, in the sense that an archive which contains an infected file is "infected". However, it is not an active infection

It depends. Typically, any infection will be flagged if the archive is opened and expanded to the HDD.

Blue

 

Windows System Restore can have infections....

 

Simple answer is that yes, archive files can harbor infections. But until they are unpacked, the infection can not run.
So, in a way, it is safe to skip scanning archives. However, I would recommend scanning any zipped files you download with an AV and another antimalware on completion of the download, or at least before you open them.

 

I P2P, so I regularly run into zip/rar files with viruses and crap in them. I use IZArc to unzip, and, what I do if Avast finds something, I click either Explore or Open. Once you can see inside the zip/rar file, you'll see the little bugger that got flagged and a lot of times you can delete that sucker right out and the other files inside stay put. When I CAN'T delete it through exploring the zip/rar file, I go ahead and extract it and the other files out, and then delete the offender. I've never, ever run into a virus/malware that ran just by being extracted from the file, they all had to execute, so it's been safe to do it this way.

 

You use Norton, I believe.

Setting Norton to scan within archives is somewhat for the paranoid; Norton will block the malware when you or something tries to extract it.

If you select for Norton to scan within archives, there is another option, called "Limit Data Extraction", ususally set to "on". That is quite confusing.

http://community.norton.com/norton/...dback&message.id=21050&query.id=438873#M21050

If you leave the option on, Norton will extract and scan a max of 2 gb of malware from an archive.