scanning links and files

[marhanen]

I was just wondering but is there anyway that i could scan links and downloadable files before i click or download them

and if yes could u tell me how

thanks

[Specter]

Not really.

Any AV program or spyware program will need complete, authorized access to the file, including 'write' rights to it, which it won't get before you DL it and put it on your PC.

Even when you have your email scanned(with the exception of Hotmail, and that's because they run McAffee on their mail servers, so your Hotmail mail is scanned before it's ever sent to you, supposedly) by Norton or any other scanner you have on your PC, your email isn't scanned until it's Dl'd to your PC, where your scanner can have full access to the file, which it won't get, if the person who owns it is smart anyway, while it's on their pubilc FTP or file server, or their webspace.

Nobody with half a brain cell is going to allow anyone from the public anything but read access on their public servers. Even though the AV scanner doesn't rearrange programming code or alter what you DL, it still writes data to the file while scanning in some cases.

Short answer:

No, you can't. Unless you know the owner of the FTP server, and have access to it so that you can run the AV program on his server, and you have rights to change file permissions when necessary.

Otherwise, the file or email must be put on your machine before you can do a thing with it, including scan it.

The best you can do is set your AV up to scan all incoming files automatically. It still puts them on your machine so it can scan them, but it quarantines the files while it scans them. But this method uses alot of resources, particularly RAM, and depending on what's being scanned and the level of the scan, it can use alot of CPU power also.

Edited March 2, 2006 by Specter

[marhanen]

thanks