MALWARE SCANNING AS A LOW PRIORITY TASK

A malware scanner 2 operates as a low priority task within a multi-tasking environment. A pending scan database 14 is maintained storing details of computer files that have been written to a data storage device 6, but have not yet been scanned. The scanner 2 operates to subsequently scan these computer files for malware at which point they are removed from the pending scan database 14 and added to the scanned file database 16.