Patent ID: 8001603

Claim:
A non-transitory computer-program product comprising a computer readable medium containing computer program code comprising: a malicious code smart scanning application for defining a dynamic scan level policy for associating malicious code scan levels with file contexts, wherein said dynamic scan level policy includes a plurality of file contexts; wherein a file context of a file is based on a location of origination storage of the file on a computer system executing the malicious code smart scanning application; and each file context in said plurality of file contexts is assigned a malicious code scan level, based on a security risk of the file context, from a plurality of malicious code scan levels, wherein said plurality of malicious code scan levels includes at least a maximum security malicious code scan level, and a minimum security malicious code scan level wherein each malicious code scan level defines a different level of scrutiny that a file is subject to in scanning the file for malicious code wherein said maximum security malicious code scan level having malicious code scanning parameters that are more rigorous than malicious code scanning parameters of said minimum security malicious code scan; a file context with a high security risk is assigned the maximum security malicious code scan level, and a file context with a low security risk is assigned the minimum level malicious code scan level; said malicious code smart scanning application further for determining a file context of a target file; said malicious code smart scanning application further for determining a malicious code scan level for said file context using said dynamic scan level policy; and said malicious code smart scanning application further for scanning said target file, at said malicious code scan level, for malicious code.