Re: Virus Total

From: "ASCII" <me@xxxxxxxxxxx>

| David H. Lipman wrote:
From: "ASCII" <me@xxxxxxxxxxx>

| David H. Lipman wrote:
From: "Caesar Romano" <Spam@xxxxxxx>

| Has anyone here used the Virus Total site http://www.virustotal.com/
| to scan a suspected file. Are they a trustworthy site?

100% trustworthy.

| Such a blanket endorsement
| should be a red flag to any reasonable person.

| Interesting how much of the essence of AV/VX/Spyware issues
| are so embroiled in careless stupidity and blind faith.

I'll tell Julio you said that. :-)

| Whoever Julio is, if he knows anything about the online vulnerability
| business, probably would agree, and probably uses that fact as a key
| aspect of whatever he's trying to accomplish.

So what is untrustworthy about Hispasec Sistemas ?

| Better than trying to prove a negative, I'd flip the question and ask
| what is trustworthy about those guys or anyone else for that matter?
| The mere proclamation of someone being a security consultant isn't worth
| much more than you pay for the bandwidth you need to read it.

Or are you just playing the devil's advocate ?

| The devil needs no advocate,
| for there so many willing to assist his efforts
| by their insouciant nonchalance.

Simply put, Julio works for Hispasec Sistemas which is a well respected Spanish security
organization that heads up VT.

VT is a server farm that performs on dmand scanning of submitted samples using 39 vendor
scanners. The files submitted are provided to the participating vendors. There is no
introduced bias or modification to the resultant reports and Hispasec Sistemas doesn't use
the collated samples for any nefarious purposes. The system provides a key service in
malware identification.

As for the comment "90% useful and 10% misleading crap.". The statistics provided are
made up numbers and opinionated.

While false positives and false negative decalartions are inevitable, VT is not
responsible for them. That is a product of the participating vendors.

As for a "misleading" tag, that is only if you are unable to interpret the findings or in
the rare case of multiple vendor false positive declarations or the possible multiple
vendor false negative.

There is nothing that is untrustworthy about the VT service which is provided as a public
service by Hispasec Sistemas.

Since they are vetted, it will be up to you and your critical thought and investigation to
prove otherwise.

--
Dave
http://www.claymania.com/removal-trojan-adware.html
Multi-AV - http://www.pctipp.ch/downloads/dl/35905.asp


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