quote:
Originally posted by foaly
if a virus is found your virus scanner is supposed to give a warning.
That's not what he is asking for either...
He is asking if WLM takes in account any output of the command line virus scanner and if WLM acts accordingly.
eg: disable the link in the conversation window and show one of the build-in virus scan warnings like "Virus scanning has determined that xxxx is unsafe."
quote:
Originally posted by Macka
What I want to know is whether WLM utilises the scan results returned by a commandline scanner such as that of AVG's. If it does utilise the results, what format does the out put have to be in or does it rely on an exit code returned by the scanner?
WLM could use your own command line tool to scan files (as shown in the screenshot above). The only output that could come from this is in the form of a
process exit code (Normally 0 means success and anything else than 0 means an error number). You don't see this code as text output (unless you write a small batch file and issue an
echo command), it is something which is passed between processes.
Unfortunatly (and to my surprise)
WLM does not use the exit code from such command line tools.
So, even if your scanners says that something is infected and it returns an exit code other than 0 indicating this,
WLM does not display a warning, nor does it disable the link in the conversation window... Nothing happens...
For this reason, the ONLY safe solution for the use of your own command line tool is to delete the file (or rename it at least) so that the link in the conversation window does not work anymore. Note that many many scanners can not 'fix' or even detect everything. And many of those scanners (incl. very popular ones!!) do not remove the file as a precaution if they can not 'fix' the file.
I dunno what the result is if you have Windows Live Onecare installed as your virus scanner in Windows Live Messenger. I suspect (at least I hope) that in this case Windows Live Messenger does disable the link in a conversation and does show a warning... but I'm not certain.
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Note that you must be extra carefull when you add your own command line tool to scan files. Not all command line virus scanners will actually fix or delete a file in case of an infection, and even fewer scanners will actually pause to inform you about something (eg: they found an infection, but couldn't fix it).
And taking in account that WLM does not react on the possible output of such command line tools, it is not uncommon to think that everything is safe and to click the link in the conversation window, eventhough the scanner reported that the file is infected but couldn't be fixed. But since the command line box openend and closed too quickly you never saw such warning from the scanner.
And even if the command line scanner pauses to inform you about it, you could still click the link in the conversation window while it is scanning!!!!!!!
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