VirusTotal

This is what we read in latest post from VirusTotal in their blog: Our goal is simple: to help keep you safe on the web. And we’ve worked hard to ensure that the services we offer continually improve. But as a small, resource-constrained company, that can sometimes be challenging. So we’re delighted that Google, a long-time partner, has acquired VirusTotal. This is great news for you, and bad news for malware generators, because: ...

h-Online: The developers of the VirusTotal online virus scanner service are currently testing a new sandbox feature to provide users with more meaningful scan results. In a post on the company’s blog, software architect and developer Emiliano Martinez says that, for this purpose, samples uploaded to the service are executed in a controlled sandbox environment where their actions can be “recorded in order to give the analyst a high level overview of what the sample is doing”. ...

The H-Security: Unknown attackers have tried to use an invitation to a prestigious conference to inject a Trojan into companies in the defense sector. The security firms Seculert and Zscaler report that opening an attached PDF flyer caused recipients’ computers to be infected with spyware via a previously undisclosed hole in Acrobat Reader. According to the report, the attack mainly targeted government-related organizations, including military and aerospace contractors, in Europe and in the US. The security firms said that the attacks started back in 2009 and peaked in autumn 2010. Talking to The H’s associates at heise Security, Seculert CTO Aviv Raff added that compromised computers, some of which had been infected for two years, were only discovered a few weeks ago. ...

VirusTotal has just coded a Google Chrome browser extension to interact with VirusTotal. The extension adds an option to the context menu to analyze links with VirusTotal’s URL analysis engine. Unlike the VTzilla Firefox extension, it does not embed an additional “Scan with VirusTotal” option in the browser’s file download dialog (mainly because Chrome’s API does not allow to do so). Having said this, it does include a top menu bar popup that enables quick VirusTotal searches and direct submission of the page being viewed to VirusTotal. ...

There is a well-respected and very useful site that everyone in the anti-virus industry uses – sometimes several times a day: Virus Total. You can upload suspicious files or their check sums to Virus Total to see if a file is malicious. The makers of a new rogue have picked up on the Virus Total name in an effort to make their malicious creation look like something legitimate: What it tries to download is detected as FraudTool.Win32.FakeRean (fs). Here’s what the real Virus Total site looks like. It basically runs your code sample or check sum against 41 anti-virus engines and displays the resulting detections. ...

In Additional to my last Post: http://boelectronic.blogspot.com/2010/03/free-fakeav-at-virus-total-thats-not.html VirusTotal.com [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirusTotal.com] is a brilliant site that helps both public and researchers alike determine if an executable file they have is potentially malicious or not. Julio Canto (of VirusTotal fame) has noticed that somebody decided to cash in on the good name of the site with the following domain: virus-total(dot)in Go there, and you’ll see a message claiming the site is a “free online antivirus scanning service, click SCAN to begin scanning:“ ...

VirusTotal has been well known to most readers of the blog. It’s a free virus and malware online scan service which allows submitters to test a particular file against a multitude of malware scanners. So, it’s not highly surprising that malware authors would try to use that name to further their gain. Today we came across such a sample arriving at one of our spamtraps through a car-related forum. The message looks like this: ...

Symantec recently upgraded their scanner on VirusTotal to include their new reputation-based security engine. That has caused a spike in their detection rates, in particular Suspicious.Insight detections, and so I thought I’d take a few minutes to explain some of the background and what is going on. So what exactly is a Suspicious.Insight detection? These detections are derived from Symantec’s new reputation-based security technology. They highlight files that have not yet developed a strong reputation (either good or bad) amongst Symantec’s community of users. their goal is to keep their users’ machines safe, and part of achieving that goal means helping their users make informed choices about the files they allow on to their systems. Suspicious.Insight detections help shine a spotlight on files that have not yet developed a full reputation. ...

InfoSecurity, a great site for computer security news, just put up a story asking the very old question: “Why don’t AV vendors name malcode consistently.” The lead on the piece was: “…Fortinet, Sunbelt Software, and Kaspersky all published their lists of the most prevalent malware strains for the last month of 2009, but they didn’t match up, leading to an admission that users will inevitably be confused by the results.” Great observation, sort of. ...