Antimalware scanning is an automated check for suspicious or malicious files, scripts, and sometimes runtime behavior in a hosted environment. In web hosting, it is used to look for known malware signatures, abnormal code patterns, web shells, and other indicators that a site or server has been compromised. Because it runs continuously or on a schedule, it can catch threats that manual review would miss.
It matters because hosting platforms often contain many customer sites and shared services, so one infected account can become a foothold for spam, phishing pages, or lateral movement. Scanning helps defenders find infection early, but it is not a complete defense: attackers can hide malware in obfuscated code, exploit fresh vulnerabilities, or use stolen credentials to reintroduce files after cleanup. In practice, antimalware scanning works best with patching, access control, backups, and incident response so that detection leads to containment and recovery.