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Type of site | Internet security, file and URL analyzer |
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| Available in | Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (US), English (GB), Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese |
| Headquarters | Málaga, |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Created by | Hispasec Sistemas |
| General manager | Bernardo Quintero |
| Key people | Bernardo Quintero, Emiliano Martínez, Víctor Manuel Álvarez, Karl Hiramoto, Julio Canto, Alejandro Bermúdez, Juan A. Infantes |
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| URL | www |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | June 2004; 21 years ago (2004-06) |
| Current status | Active |
VirusTotal is awebsite created by the Spanish securitycompany Hispasec Sistemas. Launched in June 2004, it was acquired byGoogle in September 2012.[1][2][3] The company's ownership switched in January 2018 toGoogle Security Operations, a subsidiary ofGoogle.[4]
VirusTotal's modus operandi ismultiscanning. It aggregates manyantivirus products and online scanengines[5][6] called Contributors.[7][8] In November, 2018, the Cyber National Mission Force, a unit subordinate to theU.S. Cyber Command became a Contributor.[9] Theaggregated data from these Contributors allows a user to check for viruses that the user's own antivirus software may have missed, or to verify against anyfalse positives.[10] Files up to 650 MB can be uploaded to the website or up to 32 MB sent via email. Antivirus software vendors can receive copies of files that were flagged by other scans but passed by their own engine, to help improve their software and, by extension, VirusTotal's own capability. Users can also scan suspectURLs and search through the VirusTotal dataset. VirusTotal uses the Cuckoosandbox for dynamic analysis ofmalware.[11]VirusTotal was selected byPC World as one of the best 100 products of 2007.[12]
On July 2023, VirusTotal issued an apology after one of its staff unintentionally exposed the private information belonging to 5,600 VirusTotal's customers, including the email addresses ofUS Cyber Command,FBI, andNSA employees.[13][14]