Scan Suspicious Files with multiple antivirus engines
I bet you must have been in the situation where you downloaded a file from the Internet or maybe you found a suspicious file on your computer and you want to verify if it contains a virus or malware in it. Well, you could of course scan it with your locally installed antivirus software, but this is not enough anymore. Even if your installed antivirus finds the file as clean, this does not mean it actually is. Newer malware and virus scripts can encrypt and hide themselves such that many antivirus programs can not detect them. Fortunately there are a couple of online “Multiple Antivirus Engine” websites which allow you to upload a file and have it scanned with several antivirus programs (for FREE) to verify if the file is safe or not.
- VirusTotal (http://www.virustotal.com/)
- VirScan (http://www.virscan.org/)
This is the most popular online “multiple antivirus engine” site. Taken from the website itself, “VirusTotal is a service that analyzes suspicious files and facilitates the quick detection of viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by antivirus engines“.
The website uses several command line versions of antivirus programs to scan your uploaded file for any kind of malware. The signatures of the antivirus engines are updated regularly. The uploaded file is scanned from 39 different antivirus engines including AVG, ClamAV, Comodo, ESET NOD32, F-Secure, McAfee, Kaspersky, Microsoft, Panda, Sophos, Symantec, TrendMicro etc.
After scanning, the website will give you a report from each antivirus engine whether the uploaded file was found clean or not.
This is similar with the above. It has an upload file limit of 20Mb. Taken from the website itself, “VirSCAN.org is a FREE on-line scan service, which checks uploaded files for malware, using antivirus engines, indicated in the VirSCAN list“.
The site scans your uploaded file with 37 different antivirus engines including the most popular ones (same as those in VirusTotal website).
Have those websites in mind before installing any program that you have downloaded from the Internet.
