Information Security Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for information security professionals. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Sometimes antivirus administrators don't want to add any exceptions for the antivirus software. My question is what is the risk of adding paths that whose permissions are correctly configured to allow only read/write by administrators.
In that case I think that if you already find a malware executable or file in that path you are already owned.
The risk is only one where malware is installed to said paths. This may be possible if you are using an installer which itself is benign and which asks for administrative privileges, but which installs malicious executables or libraries (for example installers that are bundled with adware). If you trust anyone who enters the administrator password to not install anything malicious, by accident or otherwise, then there should be no downside to whitelisting paths that only the admin can write to.
