Security analysts world-wide are demanding a single pane of glass experience from their products. Corporate cybersecurity stacks are increasingly complex: too many tools and services, information scattered across numerous databases, arduous stitching together of disparate sources, etc. Incident response and threat hunting have become a time consuming quest across multiple browser tabs. The experience is poor.
If you develop some kind of security product, you will probably know that a common request coming from users is to integrate VirusTotal threat context and reputation. CrowdStrike can speak to this popular demand, just recently we worked together to build a Falcon-VirusTotal integration for their CrowdStrike store. We will be speaking about this and other integrations with our antivirus partners in future posts.
Notwithstanding, at VirusTotal we have to make sure that our data is not misused to the detriment of the ecosystem, this is why we have a strict policy regarding scanning companies and use of our services. This is also why our premium service terms prohibit displaying raw data in 3rd-party products and interfaces, especially those exposed to end-customers.
This said, over time we have seen many legit use cases for integration, mostly revolving around enrichment (adding a layer of context) of alerts/detections that get generated through some means other than VirusTotal. Indeed, when Incident Responders and SOC analysts review alerts, they want to answer questions such as:
- Given a hash in an alert, is there any second stage payload that I should be searching for in my environment?
- What’s the C2 infrastructure tied to a given hash? Has it shown up in my network logs?
- Given a domain flagged by my IDS, is it a flagrant false positive based on its popularity and malicious observations recorded by VirusTotal?
- Given an IP address that matched my threat feeds, has it been seen serving malware? If so, which hashes? Have those been seen across my fleet of machines?
- Once my EDR reveals a compromise, is it a well known threat to the industry? i.e. is it widely detected? Is it rather a targeted attack?
- Are extremely basic and often just display detection ratios, which is not only on the verge of compliance but is pretty useless given today’s false positive and false negative rates.
- Fail to display the wealth of contextual information that VirusTotal records: C2s and network traffic, delivery mechanisms, relationships with other artifacts, submission and in-the-wild metadata, crowdsourced detections via {YARA, SIGMA, IDS} rules, etc.
- Do not evolve as VirusTotal itself improves. Whenever we incorporate new data points or release new features, these rarely show up in those integrations. Moreover, for them to show up the integrator must invest engineering resources to update the logic.
- Miss the opportunity to create a single product experience where common customers can easily pivot from the 3rd-party product into VirusTotal to conduct deeper investigations.
- It can enrich the most common threat observables: files/hashes, domains, IPs and URLs.
- You do not need to parse complex API response objects and build fancy templates, VirusTotal directly serves a report with all the context that we have for the observable.
- The report can be styled to match your interface.
- VirusTotal seamlessly adds new features and data points to the widget, without requiring engineering work on your side to update.
- It allows you to display all VirusTotal details, not just a subset of them. Moreover, it is not constrained to an analysis data dump, it also displays our threat graph for the given observable and any related IoCs.
All the details displayed in the report are pivotable, meaning that your users can search for similar files, jump to other files communicating with the same domain, discover other malware signed with the same authenticode certificate, etc. with a single click.
Most importantly, VT AUGMENT technically ensures compliance with our terms. Since we are not exposing parseable API fields, there is no room for backend black magic to drive detections, perform machine learning, copy signatures or other non-compliant use cases that would go against the VirusTotal ecosystem.
You can see VT AUGMENT in action in the following demo environment that simulates a SIEM alerts dashboard, click on the VirusTotal icon next to each observable to display the VT AUGMENT widget:
https://www.virustotal.com/ui/widget/demo/dedicated?full=1
Please note that VT AUGMENT still requires you to implement a bring-your-own-api-key model where your end-users plug their API key into your product. This said, we are also open to consider integrations driven by a single integrator key, always with prior consent from VirusTotal.
You can dive into the specifics surrounding the VT AUGMENT integration in our API reference:
https://developers.virustotal.com/v3.0/reference#widget-overview
A standard VirusTotal API key will be enough to test the flow, but remember that the final setup must make use of each of your users’ API keys, unless you have explicit permission from VirusTotal. Additionally, note that we have also published a handy javascript client library to further ease the task of displaying the widget report in your own interface:
https://github.com/VirusTotal/vt-augment
If you are interested in integrating VT AUGMENT and require more API quota to develop and test the setup, need some help with the technical implementation or want to discuss partnership opportunities involving this new widget please do not hesitate to contact us.
We will be creating a specific section in our main VirusTotal website to document and showcase these integrations. Similarly, we will be showing some gratitude to the first adopters by featuring their integrations in an upcoming blog post series on this topic, stay tuned!
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