Tuesday, February 14, 2012

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VTchromizer version 1.1

VTchromizer is a Google Chrome browser extension for interacting with VirusTotal. We describe its full functionality in its official documentation and you can install it directly from the Chrome Web Store. The extension embeds a new context menu dialog option whenever you right-click on links, this option allows you to scan the target URL with VirusTotal prior to visiting the given site.

The main purpose of VTchromizer is to help the community in securing their systems. Having said this, if we can also collect interesting data to analyse and study, even better. We are interested in malware, obviously, so if you come across any malicious file download link do not hesitate to scan it with VTchromizer. Additionally, have been encouraging users to send us phishing and any other fraud/ecrime related sites. Why? Hopefully these sites will end up being processed by the URL analysis tools integrated in VirusTotal and will improve their efficiency, and thus end-user protection.

A while ago one of VTchromizer's users made a comment on our Chrome Web Store site:
Nice extension! VirusTotal is extremely useful tool to keep you safe on the Internet. One small bug though. When I right-click on the link, I see a simple line in the menu: "Scan with VirusTotal", which works fine. However, after I click on the toolbar VirusTotal icon, the right-click menu changes. I see now the reference to VTchromizer, which points to 2, 3, 4 or more repetitions of the line "Scan with VirusTotal". The number of repetitions of this same line corresponds with the number of times I click on the toolbar icon - it can be 10, 15 and higher. It should be fixed. I use latest Chrome 12.0.742.112.
It was a really stupid bug whereby the toolbar popup kept loading a JavaScript file that added the "Scan with VirusTotal" option to the context menu each time it was loaded. We have corrected this bug and made available a new version of the extension, VTchromizer v1.1. Those of you already using the extension should have transparently received the update.

As usual, we really appreciate your feedback and are really keen to keep improving the functionality of our tools, thus, all your comments regarding VTchromizer are welcome at our contact site.