Google buys popular online Malware scanner Virus Total

virus-totalContinuing its spree of buying startups, Google gets their hands on Virus Total, a nice web service which checks files for viruses.

Virus Total checks files for viruses using over 42 different Anti-virus software and shows the result of each Anti-virus after the scanning gets completed. It’s a web app, so there’s nothing to download or install.

You can also check websites for viruses and they have a community rating the same. But I guess, WOT (Web of Trust) is a better tool if you want to check credibility of a website.

Apparently, as Google has now acquired them, they have access to better infrastructure. May be we’ll get to see better features like faster scanning, increasing the upload limit etc.

Google can even try integrating this into Google products like Drive or even Chrome/ChromeOS. But from what I understood from their blog post, Google won’t be shutting down this service, unlike what happened to previous acquisitions.

Link: VirusTotal blog

Related: 4 Ways to scan suspicious Files/Email attachments using online using Virus Total