VirusTotal delivers the collective wisdom of 32 viruskillers on-demand
Description: Virustotal is a web service that provides on-demand scanning of your local files for worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by antivirus engines. It allows you to upload any local file up to 10 megs in size and will perform a scan across 30+ different virus scanning engines (which include all of the leading heavy-hitter virus killer engines on the market).
Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that most of us have fairly competent, updated virus-killer and antispyware software and firewalls that keep malware attacks at bay. But what if you want to open a file or run an .exe that is, by your estimation, of dubious origin? It is possible for you to manually override your antispyware and firewalls merely because you are accustomed to doing so when they intercept legitimate software and files and ask for your arbitration. Or, alternately, you might have a dangerous file that is simply not being recognized as such for whatever reason by the security software you are using. 
This issue is of particular concern to me as I like to think that all the software featured on Freewaregenius is malware free, and the way I "check" for this is to simply try out the software and see how the security software I run responds, which is not really a guarantee that a file is malware free.
Enter Virustotal, a service that will scan any file that you upload to it using more than 30 virus detection engines with all the latest updates, making it far more likely that if the file in question is dubious that it will be recognized as such by a subset of these engines at the very least. Here are more notes on this service:
- Types of malware detected: can detect worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by antivirus engines. This does note include adware (I tested with a known adware program), but most (not all) of the engines will identify spyware.
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Posted January 25, 2008
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