If you feel that a file or zipped attachment is suspicious, and you need a powerful online scanner to scan your file or email attachment and detect the virus, VirusTotal is a very good free online virus scanner with about 41 antivirus scans in one scan request. It can even scan password protected email attachments that you receive in your emails and your email virus scanner cannot be able to scan it, often. For example Gmail virus scanner cannot scan the email attachments like zip or rar or pdf files that are password protected.
VirusTotal is a service that analyzes suspicious files and facilitates the quick detection of viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by antivirus engines.
Procedure to put the file to scan:-
1. You can directly upload the file to VirusTotal online virus scanner. You can also send it over SSL (encrypted).
2. You can email to [email protected] with Subject as SCAN. Attach the required file or email attacment to be scanned. Only one restriction is that file size should not exceed 20MB, otherwise the system will reject it. You will get the analysis report as a reply to your mail, showing you the whether the file is infected or not.
3. You can directly download VirusTotal Uploader and then you can right click any suspicious file and Send To ==> VirusTotal.
VirusTotal Online Virus Scanner Free Analysis report format:-
The analysis report is a detailed report, but the most important part is on the top, i.e. Result!
You could see BitDefender, Comodo, DrWeb, Kaspersky, McAfee, Panda, PCTools, Symantec, VirusBuster antivirus in the list. So it is powerful, undoubtedly!
All the virus signatures are updated real-time, the below graph shows the statistics at the time of writing this post:-
Graph Credit : VirusTotal
You should note that VirusTotal is not a substitute to the antivirus For PC that we put in our PC as it scans individual files on demand, and does not run full system scans.