I just installed CIS v4 yesterday and ran an initial scan of my entire system, which consists of several 1 & 2GB drives. Previously I was using Avast and was able to exclude files with a particular extension. This was very useful because any time I had a questionable file I would add “.vir” as it’s extension, knowing full well it was potentially a problem, but with all “.vir” files excluded from future scans, thus not annoying me in the future. I currently have several hundred files renamed in such a way.
I cannot figure out how to do this with CIS. Is there a way to do this, even through a hack?
Otherwise, CIS is forcing me to continually “work for it” rather than it “working for me.”
Click Add and browse to one of the files you would like to exclude and click the arrow to add it to the Selected Items window. Click apply.
Now you can right-click on the new exclusion and edit the file path. Using the asterisk to denote a wildcard to do away with the path preceding the extension, it should look like:
Thank you for your suggestion. When I saw it, I thought, “that’s brilliant - why didn’t I think of that?” I immediately tried it, but unfortunately it didn’t work – for me – because I ZIP or RAR most of my files. Apparently CIS only looks at the outside container, not the inside files, when flagging.
I am impressed with CIS, given my brief experience and testing, however with a few tweak’s they could go from having a good product to a “great” product. I make the decisions for 100’s of clients every year on what products they purchase and thus far I’d tell them that CIS (or Pro, I assume) is very, very good, but not excellent.
Besides the ability to painlessly add exclusions by file extension, there are a few other obvious “improvements” I have noted to-date.
When CIS indicates that something has been placed in their “Sandbox” it should show up in their sandbox; they don’t.
Their settings should offer the ability to “NOT” have their scan process automatically be on top of everything else running on my monitor during it’s scan; that’s annoying.
It’s like Comodo got so many things right, but overlooked some obvious things.
The AV should be scanning your .zip and .rar files, but there is a limit as to how deep it will go. There are some archive types it skips, like .7z. At least it used to, I haven’t tried it recently.
I guess I’m confused what is actually going on. You say it’s not scanning inside the archives, yet you say it’s flagging these files that you’ve apparently placed in archives. ???
Yes, Comodo has definitely made some interesting design decisions that don’t make using the application very intuitive. As odd as it may seem, files on the exclusion list have only fairly recently started being excluded from scans. Previously, the files were still scanned and the only thing actually excluded was the resulting alert if there was a detection. Not exactly what you’d expect from an exclusion list.
Yes, much like the exclusion list not actually excluding, this would seem to be obvious functionality. Look under the tab labeled Programs in Sandbox to see what has been sandboxed. Nope. This list only shows what the user has sandboxed, which for the average user is probably nothing. Auto-Sandboxed applications must be looked for in the D+ events list and the My Pending Files list. Clear as mud!
Yes, this has been a common request on the wishlist. Again, seems obvious. Ah, window stays on top? I’ll minimize that bad boy! Oh… It’s still on top, it’s just gotten smaller and moved to the lower left corner of the screen… Why not follow the standard functionality of pretty much any Windows application and minimize to the tray or statusbar?
Agreed. I love Comodo, but they can be frustrating. There are many simple things that have been requested over and over that are never addressed.
The AV should be scanning your .zip and .rar files, but there is a limit as to how deep it will go. There are some archive types it skips, like .7z. At least it used to, I haven't tried it recently.
I guess I’m confused what is actually going on. You say it’s not scanning inside the archives, yet you say it’s flagging these files that you’ve apparently placed in archives. Huh
Possibly I wasn’t clear. Say I have three files in a zip file – File1.exe, File2.exe and File3.exe.vir. The last one was previously (or I believe) may be dangerous so I add .vir to its extension. Then I zip these three files. I added the *.vir exclusion as you suggested, thinking this would be recognized everywhere on my system. I backed up my zip files to another drive. When I ran CIS on that drive it still flagged all dangerous file and did not ignore or exclude the files I had renamed to *.vir. That’s what Avast did easily. CIS does not appear to operate this way.
You may be running into another problem with that file naming convention. CIS views dual extensions as suspicious.
So a name of File3.exe.vir may be causing problems even though logic would suggest that the wildcard should take care of the File3.exe portion of the file name. Are all of the renamed files dual extension names?
Edit: I just did a quick test. I have my music folder excluded from scans. I removed this folder from the list and just used the wildcard and extension method (In this case *.mpc) and initiated a scan. It excluded all my audio files from the scan. So exclusion by extension using the wildcard works, so I suspect your problem must be with dual extension naming.