Previously I found two websites that offers free web based multi engine virus scanner. They are VirusTotal and Jotti’s Malware Scanner. Here’s another one to add in to the list.
VirSCAN.org is a FREE service for online scanning suspicious files using several antivirus engines and you can find the result and the degree of suspicious files. VirSCAN can only help you scan the suspicious files, but VirSCAN is not responsible for the scan result from antivirus engines. If all of the engines cannot detect the file you uploaded as a malware, it can’t say it isn’t a new malware. If the file you uploaded detected as suspicious, VirSCAN will send the file and report to the antivirus vendors who provided engines for analyzing and they will update the signatures if it is a malware.
VirSCAN.org can support a maximum of 10MB limit per file. The good thing about VirSCAN is you can zip up multiple files that you want to scan in RAR/Zip format and upload to VirSCAN. VirSCAN will decompress the ZIP/RAR archive and scan all of the files. Just make sure you keep to the 10MB file size limit on the RAR/ZIP file and also less than 10 files in the archive. VirSCAN can detect compressed file with password ‘infected’ or ‘virus’ in case you want to password protect your RAR/ZIP file.
VirSCAN.org displays last 50 files scanned at the Report page. You can click on the filename to view the scanned results but you won’t be able to download the file. If you’re concerned about privacy, you can rename the filename to random characters to prevent people from seeing the original filename.
Currently VirSCAN supports 35 types of antivirus engines, while VirusTotal supports 32 and Jotti’s Malware Scanner supports only 20.
I notice that Jotti’s Malware Scanner and VirSCAN service load level is always quite high but VirusTotal is able to maintain a low service load level. Maybe VirusTotal is using a more powerful server to run this web based multi engine virus scanner. In case you urgently need to scan a suspicious file, you can use either service that is not busy.
Again I’d like to stress that web based multi engine virus scanner is not a substitute for any antivirus software installed in a PC, as it only scans individual files on demand. It does not offer permanent protection for the user’s system either.
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