Sometimes you suspect a file to be infected and in spite of your installed anti-virus application reporting that the file is clean, you still can’t get rid of the suspicion. But you also don’t know what to do next. What if your anti-virus application was wrong? Ya, quite possible. But how about if you can get the file scanned by more than thirty different anti-virus programs without installing any more software? Well, you can do that with VirusTotal.
VirusTotal is a free online service offered by Hispases Sistemas. You just upload the suspected file and VirusTotal will scan the file using about 30 different antivirus engines including Avast, BitDefender, Panda, McAfee etc and report the results. While there is no system that can guarantee 100% foolproof detection, running multiple antivirus engines is definitely far superior to that offered by just one product.
What you see below is a screenshot of a VirusTotal scan result for a file that I uploaded for test. Of course, the file is clean. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), I don’t have an infected file to use for testing.
You can also send the file by email. Just email the file as an attachment to scan@virustotal.com with ‘SCAN’ in the subject field.
