VirusTotal.com – Online Virus Scanner

I wouldn’t usually have a website as a repair tool of the week, but this site is so useful it warrants an exception. Most of us already know of online virus scanners like Trend Micros Housecall and VirusTotal.com is also an online virus scanner. However, VirusTotal.com is designed to scan a single file using the database of many different antivirus brands including AntiVir, Avast!, AVG, ClamAV, FProt, F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, Microsoft, NOD32, Panda, Sophos, Symantec (Norton), Trend Micro, Virus Blaster and more.

This website is a great way to check a suspicious file that comes up clean with your antivirus, but you still suspect it is malicious and want to check it against other scanners. It is also a great way to check to see if your antivirus has detected a clean file as a virus (called a “false positive”).

For my tests of this website, I uploaded Killbox.exe which is included in our Computer Repair Utility Kit. The reason why I chose this file is because a very small number of users said this file is infected with a virus. Due to the hacking and virus-like nature of many of the applications included in the kit (like uncovering passwords, editing registries, breaking into accounts etc.) some antiviruses labeled Killbox as suspicious. This is called a false positive as file is clean.

I used this website to test to see which antiviruses were being set off by Killbox.exe. The results are in the screenshots.

Screenshots:

URL:

http://www.VirusTotal.com