Effectiveness of Scan

I have a question about the effectiveness of scanning a downloaded application prior to installation. I try out a lot of software and always scan and check the digital signatures prior to installation but I don't always feel comfortable with the scans.

So, how effective is scanning a setup file prior to installing the software?

Jim

 

Hello Jim
It is always wise to do a scan before executing a installation file, there could be a possibility, even if it small, that malware is actually bundle with the file you want to execute. How effective it is? that I cannot say, but in my opinion it is a good routine to scan installation files before execution. Better save than sorry you know

All the best

NoobStick

 

Manually initiating a scan will at best perform the exact same scan that would be run on the files if they were executed. At worst, the manual scan won't know how to unpack the contents of the installer so it won't even know what is in there until the installer is actually writing files to disk which would give you a false negative. So that is to say, if the definitions are going to miss it then all you have accomplished is wasting a small amount of time.

 

Extracted files will be scanned anyway and that can be a reason why Unpacking is very limited in the realtime scanner and is triggered for newly created files only.

If you want to scan such files without manually extracting them, you can use additional parameters in the scanner.