Contact: Wendy Nather
Málaga, Spain-based VirusTotal, a company that provides free antivirus and antimalware aggregation services, announced that it has been acquired by Google, following the search giant’s acquisition last year of zynamics for code analysis and reverse engineering. No terms were disclosed, but given that VirusTotal is a labor of love by a team of seven engineers, we believe both sides got a good deal.
VirusTotal aggregates the results of scans from numerous antivirus engines and website scanners: a user can upload a file or submit a URL for scanning, and will receive any findings from the collection of tools. In return, VirusTotal gets to use the data from the upload and its results to add to its data store, which it will then share with all subsequent comers. The company has been firmly vendor-independent, and says it will continue to operate that way as a subsidiary of Google. (We do wonder, however, whether it plans to change the name of its company blog, currently titled ‘Inside VirusTotal’s Pants.’) The value to Google comes from VirusTotal’s position at the crossroads of antimalware research: the more people who use its service, the richer the data and intelligence will be.
The VirusTotal team makes very clear that its service is not intended to take the place of antivirus software, nor should it be used to compare commercial tools. And indeed, we can’t see it being a threat to the established antimalware vendors (in fact, the latest announced integration was Sucuri’s SiteCheck). It’s more an intelligence sink and source, and as a free service it has the best chance of collecting agnostic data that benefits the entire community. But that intelligence, together with its public and private API access, could also be used by Google internally in a number of ways, such as checking submissions to its Android store, or scanning sites before offering them as search results. The number of threat intelligence feeds is growing daily, and Google just picked up a meta-version of many of them for what we assume was a relatively low price – viewed from this angle, it was a smart move.
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