VirusTotal
VirusTotal
Multi-Engine-Analysedienst für Dateien und URLs
VirusTotal is a widely used online service that checks submitted files and URLs against numerous detection engines simultaneously and aggregates the result. Beyond that it serves as a vast, searchable knowledge base about already-seen artefacts and their relationships. For the quick initial assessment of suspicious objects it is a standard tool.
History & facts. VirusTotal established the principle of having an object assessed not by one but by many engines, thereby obtaining a more robust verdict. Today the service belongs to the Google environment and combines the engine results with extensive metadata, behavioural analyses and relationship graphs between files, domains and addresses. This enrichment makes it valuable for analysis and threat hunting.
Outlook & recommendation. An important caveat concerns confidentiality: what is uploaded is potentially visible to others — sensitive or internal files do not belong carelessly in a public analysis service. Moreover, a „clean“ result is no carte blanche, as new or targeted malware can remain undetected. As one source of assessment — not as the sole verdict — VirusTotal is very useful.