Free Online virus scanner

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Getting your computer infected by a viruses, worms, trojans and other kinds of malicious content is a big problem. This kind of problem could be avoided in many different ways like buying an anti virus software which honestly doesn’t mean your 100% protected. Some prefers their computer handled by 2 to 3 antivirus software but suffers really its speed and performance due to memory consumption of the anti-virus program and most of all getting a big shares on of budget. But worry no more if you doesn’t trust enough your installed anti-virus to handle the full protection especially when handling files downloaded from the internet then there’s new online scanner for FREE to make it sure the file you wish to download is/are free from any threats. I love to share what I had found ” Virus Total“.

How does it work screenshots:

A.) Scan file(s) from local location – Note: Maximum of 32MB of size

B.) Scan file(s) on URL link – Note: No limit of File size

So what is Virus Total?

VirusTotal is a free online service that analyzes files and URLs enabling the identification of viruses, worms, trojans and other kinds of malicious content detected by antivirus engines and website scanners. At the same time, it may be used as a means to detect false positives, i.e. innocuous resources detected as malicious by one or more scanners.

VirusTotal’s mission is to help in improving the antivirus and security industry and make the internet a safer place through the development of free tools and services.

VirusTotal’s main characteristics are

1. Free independent service

VirusTotal is offered freely to end users as long as its use has no commercial purpose and does not become part of any business activity. Even though the service is made up of engines belonging to different enterprises and organizations, VirusTotal is completely independent from these partners, we do not distribute or advertise any products belonging to third parties, we simply act as aggregators of information. This characteristic prevents us from being subjected to any kind of bias and allows us to offer an objective service to our users.

2. Runs multiple antivirus engines and website scanners

VirusTotal simply acts as an information aggregator, the aggregated data is the output of different antivirus engines, website scanners, file and URL analysis tools and user contributions. The full list of antivirus solutions and website scanners used in VirusTotal as follows provided in the table below.

Anti-Virus list of URL Scanner
Avira	BitDefender
CLEAN MX	G-Data
Google Safebrowsing	Malc0de Database
MalwareDomainList	Opera
ParetoLogic	Phishtank
SCUMWARE.org	SpyEyeTracker
TrendMicro	URLQuery
VX Vault	Websense ThreatSeeker
Wepawet
Yandex Safebrowsing

3. Real time updates of virus signatures and blacklists

The malware signatures of antivirus solutions present in VirusTotal are periodically updated as they are developed and distributed by the antivirus companies. The update polling frequency is 15 minutes, this makes sure that the products are using the latest signature sets.

Website scanning is done via API queries to the different companies providing the particular solution, hence, the most updated version of their dataset is always used.

4. Detailed results from each scanner

VirusTotal does not only tell you whether a given antivirus solution detected a submitted file, it also displays the exact detection label returned by each engine (e.g. I-Worm.Allaple.gen).

This feature is also present in URL scanners, most of them will discriminate malware sites, phishing sites, suspicious sites, etc. Moreover, some of the engines will provide additional information explicitly stating whether a given URL belongs to a particular botnet, which brand is targeted by a given phishing site, etc.

5. Real time global service operation statistics

Information about the number of resources (files and URLs) processed by VirusTotal can be found in the  in their website statistics section. These statistics provide a number of notions and groupings such as global detection ratios for the received files, submissions per country, most popular detection labels, etc. No statistics comparing the different antivirus products and website detection engines are generated neither will they be ever generated (on a public or private basis), even though their calculation is trivial, the reason behind this is that using VirusTotal for antivirus testing is a bad idea.

6. Automation API

File and URL scanning can be automated with a free public API. For obvious reasons (including prevention of competition with the antivirus products present in VirusTotal), the public API is subjected to a strong request rate limitation. Should a user require a higher request rate, a honeypot API is available for researchers and a private mass API is offered to individuals with commercial and product enhancement intentions. A detailed specification of the different APIs can be found in their website advanced features section.

Virus Total in action: