Avast Falsifying Ransomware Warning

[XLORM]

Decided to run a smart scan on one of my old laptops on which I had redirected all main user directories to another drive. Avast then comes back with this warning that my directories are open to a ransomware attack, it even goes as far as showing the filepaths to the directories, except as stated before, I had previously redirected all the directories to another drive. So Avast is using a default template that just grabs your username and assumes you have them in the default location without actually checking, then reports to you that they're vulnerable to ransomware (which yes I know that redirecting the directory makes no difference to ransomware as it will just read the registry keys to find them)

[DavidR]

I never use the default directories, but in theory they are still vulnerable to ransomware attack.  But then again I expect Avast to protect against ransomware attack, after all it is an antivirus/malware product, or are they saying that they can't.

If you are an Avast Free user, the smart scan in my humble opinion is more of a sales opportunity than any real protection.  Which is one reason I rarely run any on-demand scan (outside of beta testing and questions in the forums) and this include the so called smart (NOT) scan.

[bob3160]

You'll find some more information on the "Smart Scan" here,
https://youtu.be/g73CbYvwFy8