cameronschmidt•28d agoProlific Poster

Swapped from weekly full scans to daily targeted ones and it saved my home lab

I used to run a full system scan every Sunday morning like clockwork, taking 4-5 hours on my main PC. After a buddy at the 2023 BSidesLV conference showed me his setup with daily scans on just the C drive and critical folders, I switched over last fall. Now I do quick targeted scans each night while I sleep, and I caught a sketchy registry key within 12 hours last month. Has anyone else dropped full scans for a leaner schedule and noticed better detection times?

3 comments

3 Comments

lisa528d ago

Read a writeup from some SANS guy last year who said most breaches start in user-land folders anyway, so hammering the whole system weekly is kinda wasteful. Makes sense when you think about it, right? A nightly targeted sweep on the boot drive and common malware spots like AppData probably catches the nasty stuff before it even has time to dig in. Plus your full scan backup is still there if something feels off. Kinda crazy how long we all stuck with the old way just because that's how it was always done.

susana6628d agoTop Commenter

Malwarebytes found 73% of their hits in AppData alone in a 2023 test, so yeah, user folders are really where it's at.

kevin_dixon20d ago

Saw a 2022 study that put 87% of malware first landing in tmp or AppData, which backs up what @susana66 said about user folders being ground zero.