Pierluigi Paganini June 21, 2018

Alphabet owned cybersecurity firm Chronicle announced the launch of a new VirusTotal service that promises to reduce false positives. 

VirusTotal Monitor service allows developers to upload their application files to a private cloud store where they are scanned every day using anti-malware solutions from antivirus vendors in VirusTotal.

Every time the service flags the file as malicious, VirusTotal notifies it to antivirus vendor and to the developer.

Of course, files analyzed by the VirusTotal Monitor service will remain private and are not shared by the company with third-parties.

The service implements a Google-drive like interface to allow developers to upload their files and a dashboard to display the scan results. Both developers and AV companies could access the dashboard, the service also provided APIs to integrate Monitor with their tools implemented by developers and antivirus vendors.

“Enter VirusTotal Monitor. VirusTotal already runs a multi-antivirus service that aggregates the verdicts of over 70 antivirus engines to give users a second opinion about the maliciousness of the files that they check.” reads the announcement published by VirusTotal.

“For antivirus vendors this is a big win, as they can now have context about a file: who is the company behind it? when was it released? in which software suites is it found? What are the main file names with which it is distributed? For software developers it is an equally big win, as they can upload their creations to Monitor at pre-publish stage, to ensure a release without issues.”

VirusTotal pointed out that Monitor service is not a free pass to get any file whitelisted.

“Sometimes vendors will indeed decide to keep detections for certain software, however, by having contextual information about the author behind a given file, they can prioritize work and take better decisions, hopefully leading to a world with less false positives,” continues the announcement.

“The idea is to have a collection of known source software, then each antivirus can decide what kind of trust-based relationship they have with each software publisher.”

Are you interested in this service? Now you can request a trial period for VirusTotal Monitor.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – VirusTotal Monitor, malware)

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