Virustotal adds Malwarebytes engine to online virus scan
Virustotal is probably the most popular online virus scanning service on the Internet. The main reason for this, beside the fact that it has been around for a long time, is that it is easy to use, does not require you to register an account first to scan, and provides you access to currently 46 different antivirus engines that your files get tested against.
Google recently acquired the service which many thought would be the end of the service on the Internet. We have seen it happen before; Meebo for instance was discontinued shortly after the service's acquisition by Google. A notification on the Virus Total website on the other hand assured visitors that everything would remain the same. The team even promised that the service would get even better, thanks to Google's infrastructure that it was now allowed to use for its services.
If you have been to the Virustotal blog recently you may have noticed that the team has published several announcements in the past couple of days. Three new antivirus engines have been added to the list of supported engines, and among them the much acclaimed Malwarebytes engine.
Malwarebytes produces popular antivirus solutions such as Anti-Malware Free and Pro which have some of the best detection rates of the industry.
Nano, an engine by a Russian antivirus company has furthermore been added to the list of supported scan engines as well. The team has added two url scanners to the company's website scanning service: Malekal, named after one of Virustotal's most active users and AdminusLabs, which adds its large set of data to the scanning service.
The addition of Malwarebytes' scanning engine is certainly a welcome addition to Virus Total which now makes available many of the best antivirus engines to its users.
The company's Chrome extension, Vtchromizer has seen an updated recently as well. You can now right-click on md5, sha1 or sha256 hashes to look up reports on Virustotal. If you right-click text, the extension will instead look through the comments that the VirusTotal Community has left about it.
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Virustotal is IMHO one of the premier net services – it’s not in my Bookmarks – it’s on my toolbar. If I’m talking to a newbie about internet security, Virustotal usually crops up within 10 seconds. I have Kaspersky Internet Suite, but almost every application I install goes through Virustotal first. There are other services of course – but for me VT is the best.
I hope it continues. If it doesn’t, I hope someone else can take up the reins – after all this isn’t exactly a patentable idea.
A service like this needs free access – to protect us all not just the enquirer. But I for one would happily pay for a premium service that had no filesize limits.
Just slightly OT, I can remember writing to a major UK computer magazine in the mid-1990s, observing that at least some anti-malware needed to be universal and free – in everyone’s interests ultimately. It seemed to me to be obvious and inevitable. My letter was published – and ridiculed by the editor as a hopeless flight of fancy.