A broken file means that the engine found some irregularity in the structure of the file according to the recognized file format. This means that the engine cannot extract some part of an archive, or cannot continue the traversal. A file can be broken for different reasons, for example an archive can be broken because of the end is missing, some marker bytes gone wrong in a faulty network copy, the file is in some unsupported format or someone modified the file in a malicious way to prevent av scanners to process it correctly. The engine tries its best to extract and traverse as much of the given file as possible, tries to repair common or known faults and scans the partially extracted parts too. Most broken files actually damaged in such a way that the file itself is not working, a document for example cannot be opened with the appropriate editor, an executable cannot be executed by the OS or an archive cannot be extracted with the unpacking application. We try our best to process every file, if there is a commonly used application or OS that can open that file, however, it cannot be guaranteed, that a broken file is clean.Article ID: 149, Created On: 8/27/2010, Modified: 6/30/2011