Viruses were found but were not automatically cleaned. What can I do? Symptoms
The F-Secure security product reports an infection and states that it cannot automatically remove the infected files. Instead you will be asked to remove the files manually. In addition, in some cases the reported files cannot be found (anymore) on the system.
Diagnosis
When the F-Secure security product reports anything malicious on your computer it has already detected and stopped it, preventing it from causing any harm to your system or your data. Our security software will not remove infected files under some circumstances, they will however do no more harm than wasting your disk space and cause additional virus warnings whenever you or a system process is accessing that file.
Reasons for not deleting an infected file can be:
- File is an important system file and removing it would render your computer unusable. We prevent the malware embedded in those files from causing any harm to your system or your data, so you will be protected despite the frequent virus warning you will get whenever the infected file is executed, or otherwise accessed.
- The file is inside an archive. In that case we would have to delete the complete archive to remove it, including all clean files therein.
- The file is a temporary file created by an application, like browser downloads in progress, network streams and similar. Those files are usually locked by the application creating them, which means they cannot be opened or executed to do their damage, but also not deleted by F-Secure Anti-Virus at that point. Those files are then either replaced with a permanent version or automatically discarded when the process is finished.
Those are the cases where the files cannot be located on the system when trying to remove them manually.
Solution
It is very likely that your system is clean and safe but to be absolutely sure, run a manual full computer scan:
- Update the virus definitions manually to make sure the F-Secure security product has the latest database updates installed.
- Run a full computer scan. This will allow for a more thorough scan and is highly recommended especially if you suspect an infection.
