I always preferred Jotti which if I remember correctly (and could well be wrong) was around earlier than VirusTotal. Both are excellent services but I do find it odd that Google would make this purchase as they could set up the same service pretty quickly themselves with their resources and hoards of coders. Any light on the why they would purchase such a company?
Google beefs up security portfolio with VirusTotal buy
Google has bought online malware-scanning firm VirusTotal and is pledging to keep the service open to support security software vendors. "We've worked hard to ensure that the services we offer continually improve. But as a small, resource-constrained company, that can sometimes be challenging," the security firm said in its " …
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Friday 7th September 2012 22:31 GMT Matthew Anderson
It is not virus protection, this is a service that will scan suspicious files which you have uploaded to them. You download msoffice.exe, upload it to VirusTotal and it will scan it on a multitude of AV applications and they let you know if any of them found it suspicious, at the same time as forwarding any suspicious files to AV companies for them to analyse and create sigs from. (hence why virus writes do not upload their malware to such places for testing purposes)
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Saturday 8th September 2012 17:57 GMT RICHTO
Well they base all their products on Linux which is the Swiss Cheese of OSs, so it makes perfect sense. They desperately need a toolset to stop the hundreds of vulnerabilities in their products being attacked:
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2203907/android-devices-most-at-risk-from-mobile-malware
http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/17/android-malware-q2-2012-study/
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Friday 7th September 2012 21:11 GMT James 100
Google, where products go to die?
It was a useful service - just as well there's still jotti.org. How long before Google break it by welding it to Google- to get another user, or just deletes it to free up the developers for bolting pointless shininess to something I'll never want?
I thought the "invent neat new program/service, get popular, get bought by megacorp" was bad, until Google extended it with "then kill the product off and dump the users". Are they really that bad at attracting good staff that they have to buy whole companies just to extract the staff?!
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Sunday 9th September 2012 00:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Uses
Well for starters, the VirusTotal malware site list will almost certainly be integrated into the Safe Browsing API, https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/ - which in turn is used to check against the index that returns search results. (phishtank.com is another good resource for this kind of thing)
Perhaps they'll go further and integrate scanning of pages for nasties at index time too.
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Sunday 9th September 2012 07:40 GMT adnim
I is surprised
Google have resource to knock up something to rival Virustotal in a week or two.(presuming AV vendors respond to Google partnership requests in a timely fashion) I can only presume the reason for Google acquiring Virustotal is that this aquisition provides Google with a ready made service AND removes competition at the same time. I just hope one does not have to sign in to use the service.
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Monday 10th September 2012 13:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
It's strange acquisition. Aggregated scanning using command line scanners from 40+ different vendors isn't *that* hard a task to achieve. For a company as well resourced as Google, it would be a piece of cake.
If they wanted the capability, why buy it, when they could create their own for relatively little investment.
What do VT have that is unique and difficult for Google to recreate?
If they're going down the path of integrating an aggregated scanning service into their own products, then VT may have the technology, but in reality, they're using other vendor's technology. And each of those vendors is going to require a new commercial agreement with Google if their technology is going to be integrated in other Google services. That's a big headache for their legal department right there - having to negotiate licencing agreements with 40+ separate AV vendors, including the likes of MS who are well known for taking a carefree approach to anyone that attempts to use their technology without paying for it.
I'll be watching this one closely to see what they do with it...