VirusTotal.url_scanners.extend(Quttera, ESET)

We are pleased to announce that we are including two new URL scanners in VirusTotal: Quttera and ESET. At the same time, we are also updating Trend Micro's and Antiy-AVL's web checkers, the changes should improve their detection rates, enhancing the overall aggregate detection capability of VirusTotal's URL scanning engine.

Quttera describes its technology as follows:

WIS is a BETA version of a cloud based application that utilizes Quttera exploit detection technology. This online URL scanner investigates URLs in order to detect suspicious scripts, malicious media and any other web security threats hidden into legitimate content and located on web sites. 

As to ESET, its URL scanner is usually embedded in their antivirus software, providing a holistic solution:

At ESET, we are dedicated to developing high-performing security solutions for home users and corporate customers, detecting and disabling all known and emerging forms of malware.

We are really excited to announce these changes since we have just reached 37 URL scanners, even though not all of them always show up due to timeout issues. We will soon catch up with the number of file scanners. If your company/team develops a link checker or maintains a malicious URL dataset do not hesitate to contact us, we will be more than happy to integrate your solution/dataset.

Read More

Public API request rate limits and tool development

Our goal is simple: to help keep you safe on the web. For this to happen, among many other technical fireworks, we need to receive as many (hopefully malicious) files as possible that we can eventually share with the antivirus and security industry in order to allow them to improve their products and technologies.

One of the ways we envisioned increased submissions to VirusTotal was through the release of our public API. Many tools and security deployments (honeypots, honeyclients, sandboxes, etc.) are making use of it and we are delighted that they do so. However, very often I see that integration with VirusTotal's API could be simpler.

Many users ignore the fact that public API request rate limits are enforced on (IP address, API key) tuples. What does this mean? Users sharing a same API key with different IP addresses will be subjected to independent request rate counters. Putting it simpler, if you are a tool developer, you might want to create a public API key for your tool and embed it in your application, that way, by default, you would not have to ask the user to create an API key and the whole integration with VirusTotal would be transparent. 

Having said this, it is always wise to have a settings file or tab that allows users to change this default key:

• Some users might be behind some sort of proxy, corporate network aggregator, NATting device, or similar setup that makes them share the same IP address with other users of your tool, these users should be given the option to create their own API key and modify the setting in your tool.
• Some users might just want to use an independent key in order to track their own submissions in their VirusTotal Community profile.
• Some users might simply find the public API request rate limit too low, they might want to speak with VirusTotal about the possibility of getting a private API key, they should be able to embed that independent private API key in your setup.

So, imagine this hypothetical situation: I want to build a tool that whenever a USB storage device is plugged into a given PC it inspects its files, looks for any autorun.inf file and submits to VirusTotal any referenced executables in it. I would create an VirusTotal Community account for my tool and retrieve the corresponding API key, I would hardcode that into my application and make the tool use it by default. This said, I would also have a settings tab in my application that would allow users to change this key for any other key they might register. Of course, I would plan to render the corresponding messages informing a user about the fact they can modify the default key whenever request rate limitations are met because of IP sharing.

Hope this is useful and I would love to see more VirusTotal plugins out there with a more transparent integration such as the one described above. As usual, before doing any kind of integration please look at our Terms of Service and Best practices, tools competing with the antivirus industry or jeopardizing such industry will be immediately banned from the service. VirusTotal is a tool to help antivirus vendors in improving their products, not a means to discredit, harm them in any way or steal their intellectual property, we take this matter very seriously.

Read More

VirusTotal += ADMINUSLabs

Continuing the trend of engine inclusions we have just added ADMINUSLabs as a new URL scanner. In words of ADMINUSLabs itself:

ADMINUSLABS has built an incredibly robust and comprehensive binaries and malware collection and analysis set of tools, enabling organizations of all sizes to leverage the data analyzed and threats monitored to build better defense system. With clients and partners in every continent, ADMINUSLABS solutions offer industry leading technology, flexibility, cost effectiveness, and service levels.

ADMINUSLabs has shared its malicious URL dataset with VirusTotal, from now on, whenever a user submits a URL to VirusTotal for scanning it will also get checked against ADMINUSLabs' dataset and flagged as malicious if present in it. This is an example of a report with one such detection:

https://www.virustotal.com/url/0048c271f6c90bc6959c0eb91ed139692a1ec0f0f4b3328a9ad09baad010c7c2/analysis/1354276484/

ADMINUSLabs' dataset is very large and gets updated several times per day with thousands of new URLs, this is an excellent addition, many thanks and welcome on board!

Read More

VirusTotal += Malwarebytes

We welcome Malwarebytes (aka MBAM) as a new engine working at VirusTotal. Malwarebytes was first released in 2008.

Read More

VirusTotal += NANO

We welcome NANO as a new engine working at VirusTotal. NANO is a russian antivirus company that has been in the market since year 2009.

Read More

VirusTotal += Malekal

We are back with new inclusions in VirusTotal's URL scanning engine. This time we are excited to add Malekal's malicious URL dataset to our aggregate scanner.

Malekal is a site maintained by one of our most active VirusTotal Community users, @Malekal_morte. The site mostly deals with malware and antivirus but has support forums that help users in many other ICT fields. As a result of the support he gives and the research he conducts, Malekal comes across many malware samples an malicious URLs as we can see in his public listing (21211 documented files since March 2010 at the time of this article).

Malekal's malicious URL dataset is now being used to check whether any URL submitted by a user to VirusTotal is present in it and if so it is flagged accordingly. You should now be able to see these detections in the URL reports, just as an example:

https://www.virustotal.com/url/04d67bdebd8a74eaaac37212e35848203f55823c157aab958ad4415d1b7ba344/analysis/1354089612/

We are extremely grateful to Malekal, welcome on board!

Read More

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.

Read More