March 23rd, 2011 | 
Author: For example, a .rar or .zip file containing whatever type of infection/malicious file, can it attack a PC without me extracting the archive myself?
It’s because my Internet Security program takes days (literally) to scan archives on my external hard disk. They’re big size and I don’t want to recopy the data to the internal disk again nor I want to disable the “archive scanning” option unless it won’t endanger me some way or another.
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Only if you unzip unrar the file can they be a threat, your AV SW has the ability to scan inside the zipped file to see if there are any threads matching a virus in the AV definitions, depending on you processor and memory it could take time.
I agree with NYC help desk.com