VirusTotal Enterprise launches with new and improved features
VirusTotal, which is part of Alphabet's cybersecurity company Chronicle, announced the release of VirusTotal Enterprise on September 27, 2018.
VirusTotal was previously available as a free and premium service. The free service allowed anyone to scan files or URLs against different antivirus engines and use the built-in search to find matches in the VirusTotal database.
VirusTotal Premium, a paid service, added new capabilities and features on top of that such as Intelligence which linked items together or options to monitor uploaded files constantly to receive notifications whenever supported antivirus engines reported new issues with a monitored file.
VirusTotal Enterprise
The new VirusTotal Enterprise service aims to "help enterprise threat intelligence teams move much faster and smarter". The service introduces new features exclusive to enterprise customers and improves existing features next to that.
Private Graph and improved Search
Private Graph is one of the new features that VirusTotal Enterprise supports and an extension to the Graph feature that VirusTotal launched earlier this year. Private Graph gives Enterprise customers options to include assets such as devices, people, email and other sets of data to include these in visualizations.
Basically, it is a way to add custom sets of data to VirusTotal to have these analyzed just like files and other data bits that VirusTotal detects and analyzes by default. The new functionality provides organizations with options to see connections between company assets and malware in a private environment.
Search is the second major feature that is available to VirusTotal Enterprise customers. Search speed was improved by the factor 100 using n-gram content searches. Additionally, search us more powerful and accurate as it includes new information such as emails using a similar layout or icon use across files.
One example of such a search would be to query VirusTotal to return all samples of malware that it has in its database that use the same icon.
Malware analysis improvements reveal additional information about files uploaded to the service. New information may include domain names, IP addresses, strings ranked by interest and more that these files may contain.
Other improvements and changes
Improved search capabilities and the introduction of Private graphs are certainly the main features of VirusTotal Enterprise but they are not the only ones.
The new service features user management improvements such as support for two-factor authentication support to access VirusTotal Enterprise accounts or new corporate group management options powered by APIs which allow organizations to sync user directories with VirusTotal.
Closing Words
VirusTotal Enterprise is the next logical step for the service. Especially the new ability to include company assets in visualizations should appeal to organizations as it is now possible to see how company assets such as machines related to threats.
Check out the official blog post by Chronicle on Medium as well for additional information on the launch.
A request for future articles – to include a thorough privacy analysis of any software products or online services reviewed, as the primary focus of the story, before any ‘features’ of the product or service. This essential information seems to be curiously missing from most major IT news sites articles.
May be great but I sooo don’t trust Google. They were forced to create Alphabet. Sorry, G.
@ULBoom:
This is pretty much my stance. Google (or any Alphabet company — they are all tainted) is already so abusive in its data collection that I am not about to actually volunteer any data to them whatsoever. Let them do what they do best and steal it.
This article was a good reminder for me to update to the free VirusTotal 2.2 beta.
Love Virus Total.
A Quick and Easy UI
And…I don’t mind sharing my data….because it helps ALL
…submitting your file to VirusTotal you are asking VirusTotal to share your submission with the security community and agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.