Whenever I have downloaded a suspicious file from an untrusted location, I do not count on one antivirus alone even if I am using Kaspersky. No doubt that Kaspersky antivirus is very good in detecting both known and unknown viruses, but there are really good coders that can make malicious programs to be marked as safe by antivirus program.
Sad to say for some computer newbies, they depend so much on the installed antivirus program in their computer and they often accuse legitimate software as a virus just because their antivirus software says so. Imagine, there are millions of programs with billions lines of programming codes, it’s easy for a legitimate software to be accidentally flagged as a threat by an antivirus software. That’s why I’ve written an article on how to determine if a file is dangerous or not. If the file is tested clean with VirusTotal and ThreatExpert, I can be 90% sure that the file is clean even if someone tells me that the file malicious.
For VirusTotal, it already has a desktop version where you can right click on the suspicious file using your mouse and send it for scanning with 36 antiviruses. ThreatExpert also has one.
The ThreatExpert Submission Applet is a stand-alone tool that provides you with an quick easy way to submit your samples to ThreatExpert.
The submission applet produces reports identical to the alternative online submission but instead of requiring you to upload the sample through a browser, you can upload samples using a Windows application. I’ve tested the upload speed between using the online web version and desktop applet. Weirdly, the desktop applet tool has slightly faster upload speed than the online web version. The traffic monitoring tool (NetLimiter) which I use shows that ThreatExpert Submission Applet (teapplet.exe) uploads at 25KBps steadily. As for the online submission, the upload speed fluctuates and the most it can go up to 21.8KBps.
ThreatExpert Submission Applet saves me the trouble of launching my browser, wait for ThreatExpert’s website to load, go to the Submit Sample page and then upload. Now I can just run the applet from my desktop, browse for the suspicious file and upload. It is recommended that you sign up for a free account with ThreatExpert before you submit any files with the submission applet so you can easily access your own reports online.
This submission tool is only 931 KB in size and doesn’t require installation. Can run on Windows Vista 32/64-bit, XP and 2000. I wish that they could improve this tool and make it even easier for us to upload files to ThreatExpert by adding a function in right click context menu (Right click > Send To > ThreatExpert).
[ Download ThreatExpert Submission Applet ]
Technorati Tags: threatexpert, upload, scan, sandbox, security
