The scanning mechanism

Description and

03

features

Chapter 3. The scanning mechanism

The central part of BitDefender Antivirus Scanner for Unices consists of the BitDefender architecture-independent scanning engines. These are specialized data analysis routines and malware signature definitions, since many viruses can be identified upon a distinctive code pattern. The BitDefender Antivirus engine database includes over 250000 different malware signatures, at the moment of this writing, and the number constantly increases every few hours.

For identifying the unknown viruses, the engines can perform the heuristic analysis, searching for several features characterizing the viruses.

The objects to be scanned can be directories or regular files, provided as command line parameters. After the object is eventually deployed in a temporary file, the engines are asked to start the scanning process.

Using the powerful engines, the object is unpacked, if needed, and scanned. The scanning result is sent back to bdscan, which will further notify the user and will try to apply the desired action. The action can be one of the following, triggered with --actioncommand line option.

Disinfect. BitDefender will try to disinfect the object, by removing the infected or suspected part. The action can fail sometimes.

Quarantine. The object will be moved from its original location to a secured directory, the quarantine.

Delete. The object will be simply removed from the filesystem.

Ignore. Even if infected objects are found, BitDefender will just report them and no action will be performed.

By default, bdscan will scan inside archives, inside mail boxes and inside packed programs. If this behavior is not desirable, there are command line options to disable them selectively --no-archive,--no-mail and --no-pack, respectively.

If the scanning path is a directory, bdscan will descend recursively in sub-directories and scan the files found. The recursion depth can be specified in command line or can be entirely disabled.

More in the manual page

You can find more about the supported command line options in bdscan(8) manual page.

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Unisar 1.24.1867 Scanning mechanism, More in the manual