I recently upgraded ZA to ZA Pro and afterwards ran a scan using Ad-Aware (free V1.05). ZA reported a suspicious behaviour (Ad-Aware SE Core application attempted to open another process - \SystemRoot\System32\smss.exe) As with every other warning I get I denied it and the scan ran to completion. Afterwards I looked in the OSFirewall log and found that Ad-Aware had tried to open every other running process but had failed because ZA had blocked it. Is this normal behaviour for Ad-Aware and if so what is it trying to do?? I can't ask the question of Lavasoft 'cus they wont answer questions about the free version. No other scan that I do (Ewido,Spybot,MSAS) causes this. At the time of the scan I was not connected to the internet.
The OSFirewall alert has nothing do with whether an application requires access to the internet or not. What it does is to monitor the background processes in your PC, alerting you to suspicious and dangerous behaviour. It functions similarly to other programs like Process Guard and is meant tohelp users stop malware from installing or executing. In the case of Ad-aware, when it scans for certain stuff, it needs to gain certain access to certain files to scan them. In the case of smss.exe and Ad-aware, both are known and safe programs and therefore you could allow Ad-aware to continue with its action. But if you don't feel like it and Ad-aware can continue to funtion, then you can deny it.
