Defender cannot remove some spies, errors

[Guest]

Hello,
one error window says:
Windows Defenderencountered an error: 0×80501001. One or more actions could
not be completed successfully.
Is this a kind of review window when there are some 0×80508026 errors?

 

[Bill Sanderson]

Mike Treit discussed this in one of his messages--you might do a search on
these groups on that first error message.

As I read what he said--this error indicates malware within an archive.

Windows Defender can't be certain that you want to just ditch the whole
archive, so it doesn't just remove it. It could, for example, be an archive
created as a backup of another machine (I just found malware in such a
backup on my machine--not zipped, though.)--and you wouldn't want to blow
away the whole backup because there were some bad files in it.

 

[Guest]

Are we talking zip archives here? So can't defender scan zip files? Or is
this only other types of files like rar etc.

Mike Treit discussed this in one of his messages--you might do a search on
these groups on that first error message.

As I read what he said--this error indicates malware within an archive.

Windows Defender can't be certain that you want to just ditch the whole
archive, so it doesn't just remove it. It could, for example, be an archive
created as a backup of another machine (I just found malware in such a
backup on my machine--not zipped, though.)--and you wouldn't want to blow
away the whole backup because there were some bad files in it.

--

 

[Bill Sanderson]

It isn't a matter of not being able to scan.

It is a matter of choosing in favor of data preservation.

Suppose you have a zip file containing a backup of another machine. One
item in that backup is a spyware-related executable.

It appears that what IS true, is that Windows Defender is incapable of
re-writing the archive to contain just the uninfected files. So--given the
choice between deleting the entire archive or leaving the archive out there
and alerting the user with the error dialog--it leaves the archive out
there. The error dialog will improve, we hope.

Does that make sense? We'd all like it to be able to open the archive, and
re-write it with just the safe content, but that could take a good long
time, and a lot of code.

--

Are we talking zip archives here? So can't defender scan zip files? Or is
this only other types of files like rar etc.