VirusTotal.com: Best answere for online malwares

All of us always keep on searching for good anti-virus program , but viruses these days have become so much sphisticated that, some time even anti-virus misses them. We always perform re-scan to ensure that there is no virus in the file, but still some time we end up losing our memory space, or hard-disk crash.

I was looking for a solution to this, then i found this site VirusTotal.com, here they scan the file with 40 differenet anti-virus which makes passing of virus or missing the trace of virus almost impossible.

Lets see how it works, first step is to upload the file to this website, after uploading we see that our file is queued, this is the unwanted part, beacuse none of us wants to wait just to get one file scanned, this could be the reasoned with these guys have only one server so they cannot process all users request at same time, hope they would improve this feature in near future.

Second lets see how they perform scanning, after getting the turn of our scan we see that a list of antiviruses have been shown using which our file will be scanned , thts interesting because it includes all the name which we could think of like kaspersky,microsoft,etc..

But does this means that each and every time we have to visit virus uploader ,The answere is NO, as they have introduced Virus Total uploader using which we can directly send the file to the virus total, by simple right clicking the file and selecting the option send to option. Virus uploader is a free program which can taken from virtustotal.com.

So where does the virustoal.com score above other anti-virus beacuse of its inability to check all system files which is a common option in all anti-virus. Its feature of getting the file scanned from 40 anti-virus makes it a perfect antiv-virus for the online document, as maxmimum threat, or malware or virus comes from online attachments like songs,e-mail etc. Virustotal scores above all.

aNti-VirRuS mimicing Real World ANT

ARTICLE TAKEN FORM BSSINESS-STANDARD.COM

Swarms of digital ants may soon crawl all over the internet, scouting not for food, but computer worms and self-replicating programs designed to steal information or facilitate unauthorised use of machines. Security experts have successfully deployed a new type of network security software which mimics the habits of real-world ants.

Ants on earth, for instance, wander randomly but return to their colonies when they find food. But on the way back, they leave behind pheromone trails. If other ants find the trail, they follow it and reinforce it. The idea of the ant colony algorithm follows this pattern. The digital ants wander through computer networks. When an ant detects a threat, other ants converge on the scene, drawing the attention of human operators who step in to investigate.

"In nature, we know that ants defend themselves against threats very successfully," Wake Forest Professor of Computer Science Errin Fulp, an expert in security and computer networks, said in a press statement, adding: "They can ramp up their defence rapidly, and then resume routine behaviour quickly after an intruder has been stopped. We were trying to achieve that same framework in a computer system.”

Digital ants are an application of Swarm Intelligence or SI. Examples of this concept abound in nature, and include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, and fish schooling. SI, which refers to a general set of algorithms, was made popular in works of fiction like 'Prey' from Michael Crichton, where a swarm of nano-robots attacks humans as experiments go wrong, and robotic sentinels in movies like The Matrix.

Using SI, these digital ants adapt to the variations of viruses that hackers routinely introduce. This is critical since security programs gobble up more resources, and antivirus scans take longer and machines run slower when anti-virus packages discover new threats and issue updates.

Glenn Fink, a research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, came up with the idea of copying ant behaviour. PNNL, one of ten Department of Energy laboratories, conducts cutting-edge research in cyber security. Fink was familiar with Fulp's expertise developing faster scans using parallel processing – dividing computer data into batches like lines of shoppers going through grocery store checkouts, where each lane is focused on certain threats.

He invited Fulp and Wake Forest graduate students Wes Featherstun and Brian Williams to join a project there this summer that tested digital ants on a network of 64 computers. SI, the approach developed by PNNL and Wake Forest, divides the process of searching for specific threats.

“Our idea is to deploy 3,000 different types of digital ants, each looking for evidence of a threat,” Fulp said. “As they move about the network, they leave digital trails modelled after the scent trails ants in nature use to guide other ants. Each time a digital ant identifies some evidence, it is programmed to leave behind a stronger scent. Stronger scent trails attract more ants, producing the swarm that marks a potential computer infection.”

Fulp says the new security approach is best suited for large networks that share many identical machines, such as those found in governments, large corporations and universities.

And computer users need not worry that a swarm of digital ants will decide to take up residence in their machine by mistake. Digital ants cannot survive without software “sentinels” located at each machine, which in turn report to network “sergeants” monitored by humans, who supervise the colony and maintain ultimate control.