Antivirus is always a good place to start on troubleshooting inexplicable delayshttps://twitter.com/dietrich/status/963470291824357376 …
I'll take that as a compliment I guess, but others might appreciate hearing your reasons.
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Sigh... It wasn't a compliment, as I'm sure you know perfectly well. Somebody did try to explain in the comments why at least some of it is nonsense, but you didn't listen. OK, let's look at the suggestions one by one.
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Advice #1: Scan only on transition between writing and reading. Well, sometimes a long time passes between these, you know. User unpacks a malicious archive and forgets about it. A month later he remembers and clicks on something - boom.
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So, the scanner would have to keep some kind of journal of transactions - sometimes for months, because you can never be sure. How much space is that going to take? How much time to process it?
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And in many cases most of the efforts to implement this will be wasted anyway. An executable that contains an icon as a resource could be read every time Explorer shows the directory.
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In the good old times of MS-DOS you could easily hook execute-only - but in Windows, trying to run the file always involves read. And most people appreciate a warning that they are about to copy malware to the thumb drive they're going to give to a friend.
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Advice #2: Scan once and never again until the file is modified. We've tried that. It doesn't work. It just involves additional unnecessary work to keep track of what was modified when.
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And what if, as you were explained in the comments, initially the scanner didn't catch the malware but now does? If you never re-scan, because the file didn't change, you're going to miss it permanently.
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Advice #3: Scan only executable stuff. Well, duh. What do you think we're doing? Except the problem is, do you know how goddamned much is "executable", depending on the circumstances?
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