Everyone knows you are taking a huge risk downloading files from the Internet without having any protection by your anti-virus of choice. While you are generally safe to download a file and then scan it locally before execution there may be circumstances where it would be beneficial to have the file scanned before commencing the download. Seems like quite the catch-22 doesn’t it? Not quite!
Virus Total is a free online virus and malware scanner that you may submit files or even website links to in order to be verified as clean and safe. That’s pretty easy to understand but why should you use this over a locally installed anti-virus? For starters, the web service utilizes multiple anti-virus engines with definitions that are always up to date. It is strongly recommend to not have multiple engines installed locally on your PC and your virus definition files are rarely updated in real-time, but rather on a schedule frequency. Virus Total addresses both of this issues – for free.
Visiting a second website and uploading a file or pasting a URL directly is a bit cumbersome and we all know, if something isn’t convenient then the follow-through is always lacking. In this situation, Virus Total offers an extension for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox which aids in automating the entire work-flow.
Integration is done quite well; for example, once installed in Firefox any time a download is initiated you are afforded the opportunity to scan the file using Virus Total rather than just save it directly to your hard drive. In Chrome, the integration is not as tight but it is still accessible via a right-click on files and URL links.
