Patent attributes
An antivirus client module (114) includes a virus definitions module (312) holding information describing characteristics of files that can potentially be infected by viruses and information enabling a determination of whether a file is actually infected by a virus. The client module (114) also includes a filtering module (314) having a file information cache (410) describing characteristics of files. A file scanning module (316) can scan files to determine whether the files are infected by viruses. The antivirus client module (114) queries the file information cache (410) using the information describing characteristics of files to identify the set of files that are susceptible to a given virus. The file scanning module (316) scans the files in the set.
