Pimping up VTchromizer

Among the goodies offered by VirusTotal to the community we can find VTchromizer. VTchromizer is a Google Chrome browser extension that simplifies the process of scanning Internet resources with VirusTotal. It allows you to scan links (including links to files) directly with VirusTotal's web application. It will scan the submitted URLs with URL scanners and the content downloaded from the scanned site with VirusTotal's antvirus solutions.

Some days ago Kyle Creyts from Lastline sent us an email asking us for permission to publish a small Chrome extension that made use of VirusTotal:

This extension makes a new "Get VT analysis" context menu entry when you select text and right click on it.
It's quite simple to use. You select the text of a hash in your browser, right click on it, and select "Get VT analysis for %s" from the context menu (where %s is the hash). I have it set up to use the selection length to validate that the input is a valid {md5,sha1,sha256} hash. I could easily add the ability to validate the character range (hex).

We love when the community builds tools with VirusTotal, we are absolutely in favour  of promoting third-party altruist efforts that will improve the overall end-user security. Hence, we strongly encourage Kyle to publish his extension, it is a really good idea.

It is such a good idea that we did not hesitate to include that functionality in our own official extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vtchromizer/efbjojhplkelaegfbieplglfidafgoka

As of version 1.2, whenever you select a text and right-click on it a context menu will appear that allows you to check the selected text with VirusTotal:

• If the selection is an md5, sha1 or sha256 hash the extension will display the VirusTotal report for the file with that hash.
• If the selection is any other text the extension will look for any comments in VirusTotal Community tagged with the given term.

This is in addition to the traditional feature that allows you to right-click on any link and submit it for scanning.

Thanks for the idea Kyle! As usual, if you have any suggestions or feature requests please do not hesitate to contact us, we will be more than happy to consider and implement them.

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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.

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