VirusTotal Uploader adds the option in your right-click menu to upload any file up to 20Mb to the VirusTotal website to be scanned against an array of antivirus tools. This can be very useful if you have a suspicious file that your antivirus software did not detect as harmful and would like a second opinion.
When you send a file to VirusTotal, it will first check to see if that file was uploaded before by someone else and present you with the scan results if it was seen before. If you have a new file that was not scanned before, it will upload the file and present you a webpage with the status of your upload. If the results page shows 3 or less detections, it is most probably clean. Some antivirus products can still report a file as being harmful or infected even though they are not and are called false positives. How would you know if you are dealing with a false positive or not? Common sense. For example, I recently downloaded an updated version of PickPick. After scanning with VirusTotal, 2 out of 43 scan engines found it to be insecure (VBA32 and Vipre). I know this file is most probably secure as I used PickPick for a long time and I trust it’s source. However, if I were to scan a file that I got from a shady source (strange website, email or personal message) and it would have the same result (2 out of 43) then I would probably run it in the sandbox of Comodo Internet Security if I really need to see what it is or does.
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