Thanks to Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI) from Windows 10, Bandizip provides a feature of antimalware scan on an archive, which can detect malware in the archive without decompression.

Open an archive with Bandizip and click Scan in the toolbar. You will be notified if any malware is detected.

Taking countermeasures against malware is a very important issue in the PC environment. Microsoft has introduced Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI) accordingly, a standard which allows software to call other Antivirus software (AV software) and perform a scan for malware.

Thanks to AMSI, the antimalware scan can be performed using only the content in memory and there is no need to store any infected files in storage. Bandizip scans an archive with AMSI and detects malware in the archive without decompression.

AMSI is available on Windows 10, and Windows Defender which is a built-in antimalware component of Windows 10 supports AMSI as well. Even when you are using other third-party AV software, Bandizip can perform the antimalware scan using AMSI if the software supports AMSI.

If the third-party AV software which is installed on your system does not support AMSI, AMSI becomes disabled or fails to work properly, and Bandizip cannot perform the antimalware scan.

Most AV software can detect malware (such as viruses and ransomware) hidden in an archive. Because the AV software is not archiving software, however, the antimalware scan on an archive performed solely by AV software may fail in the following circumstances:

Archiving software such as Bandizip, which does specialize in handling archive files, can provide fast and accurate malware detection with a scan optimized for the characteristics of the archive.

The sample files below are not detected as malware by most AV software.

The following links provide detection results of the sample files from VirusTotal. You may find that the sample files are hardly detected as malware by AV software.

The samples provided in the links are EICAR test files and NOT actual malware. You may learn more about EICAR in the links below.

This feature may fail to detect malware under the following conditions:

This feature cannot detect malware under the following conditions:

If AMSI initialization fails, try the following steps to solve the issue.

Real-time protection is currently off.

The AV software on your system does not support AMSI. Uninstall it and install other AV software supporting AMSI instead, and then try again. (Windows 10 comes with Windows Defender, built-in AV software supporting AMSI.)