VirusTotal will scan a file or website for viruses for free with all major antiviruses

Recently, a lot of antiviruses have taken a great interest in cloud technologies. Either Microsoft, or Panda, and soon ESET will also introduce such funds into corporate products. But "clouds" are not all that the Internet has to offer in the fight against unknown types of viruses. You can, of course, analyze processes, services and other files using specialized utilities, but there is a more motley way, ready to clamp one single file in the grip of sixty antiviruses.

Now there is a great need for online scanning of suspicious files using antivirus solutions. There is only one problem - users are accustomed to the fact that some subtle antivirus in the tray does everything for them, and sending each file for verification is an ordinary case when the situation is completely out of control.

One of the tools for online checking has long been a service called VirusTotal. For example, you suspected a file from a working flash card as malicious, went to VirusTotal.com, added it (up to 32 MB), and the system started checking. If it found a similar scanned file, it will notify you of the result of the previous scan, and if you need to re-scan, VirusTotal will start scanning with 43 antiviruses. The system checked my 14 MB file in less than 2 minutes, there are no problems with the speed.

Another thing is that the service is more suitable for checking sites for malware than for single files, since it is insanely rare to come across files that would be ignored by leading antivirus solutions and, moreover, in conjunction with a utility like AnVir Task Manager.

On the one hand, the advantage of the service is that it checks 43 anti-virus databases at once, but who does not allow you to download a couple of anti-virus scanners from leading laboratories (s) and start a search in a specific folder or file? I don't think they will bypass the infected file. It's another matter when you don't want to update the utilities, but you need to check the file with fresh databases.

For more comfortable work with the resource, there is a utility called "VirusTotal Loader". Unfortunately, there is no information about her on the official website, but she knows how to perform very useful operations. When launched, the program displays a list of active processes on your system, from which you can select a suspicious one and send it for verification to VirusTotal. The utility also allows you to select local files on the disk for scanning, or specify a remote file URL.

conclusions

The VirusTotal service is very useful in cases when you do not use antivirus software at all, or you suspect that your antivirus has missed the "malware" and want to check it with other antivirus solutions. This can be very useful in case of false positives, as well as when antiviruses "baptize" programs with malware just because the developers of this antivirus have a competing solution and it is profitable for them to get rid of competitors in this way. You don't have to go far for examples - AVG antivirus easily and naturally baptizes Reg Organizer as "potentially dangerous", while offering its own product. VirusTotal will also help you check the site you want to visit for malicious scripts.