Will Symantec Protection Engine scan a zero byte file?

Products

• Protection Engine for Cloud Services
• Protection Engine for NAS

Issue/Introduction

The question is occasionally asked: Will SPE scan a zero byte file and, if so, what will the result be?

Environment

Release : 9.1

Resolution

Yes SPE will scan a zero byte file if it is passed in via a scan request.  However, when it detects that there is no content behind the preamble of the file it knows that there really isn't much to do and will return a "clean" verdict.