What does SecureAnywhere scan?

Hey @,
 
When the agent scans the system, it will look in all areas where malware is likely to hide such as boot records, system32 appdata, temp folders etc.... It ignores the rest until those areas are acted upon.
 
During the initial install and scan, it takes longer as it is doing an inventory of what is running on the system, ensuring those programs are legit and whitelisted and marked as safe to run. Of couse it also checks for malware at this time.
 
That's the reason why scans are super fast. It's doesn't scan the entire drive as that is essentially a waste of time and system resources. A possibly malicious file residing on a doesn't mean the system is infected. It's only a threat when it's acted upon or executed, and that's when the Webroot agent springs into action to make a determination of good/bad/unknown and act accordingly.
 
It's akin to when you wash dishes at home. You go looking for dirty dishes in common places, like the counters, sink, tables, maybe over by the sofa where you watch tv. But you don't go upstairs looking under beds. If there is a dirty dish up there, it's not hurting anybody, but when little bobby finds it, you spring into action and take care of it.
 
People need to see that Webroot works quite differently than other Traditional AV and that scanning an entire disk is just a false sense of security and is not needed.
 
Other AV vendors get faster scan times by appending a small piece of code to a file after it's been scanned so that next time their agent scans a folder, it'll only look to see if that code has changed and move on, therefore speeding up their scan times a bit. Still way slower than Webroot's scan times.
 
Hope this explains things for ya.
 
John H
Nerds On Site
Webroot MSP Partner