Microsoft AV - Do Exclusions Apply to Full Scans or Realtime Protection Only?

Question

The vendor for a new system we're setting up sent us specs for their recommended A/V exclusions. They recommend that we exclude .PDF, .JAR, .BIN, and .DAT files (among others) from real-time scanning. These exclusions make sens for what the application is doing. They've also indicated that doing a full scan of these files off-hours is fine, but they suggest the exclusions from real-time scanning for performance reasons. Viruses have been known to infect these file types, so I still want them scanned during the regularly scheduled full system scans.

We're using System Center Endpoint Protection managed via SCCM 2012 R2 and the documentation is very unclear on this point:

If I add the vendor's recommended file types to the exclusions list, will that prevent them from ever being scanned? Or will it only exclude them from real-time protection? In the settings pages, there are not very many settings to configure configure real-time protection.

Answer 1

After experimenting with it, I have come to the conclusion that a file exclusion is a file exclusion period. It applies to both real-time scanning and full scans. There is no way to separate out realtime vs. full scan exclusion settings.