Your Opinions on Virustotal ?

[Seeker47]

. . . which is often cited as a 'Go To' source, both here and at a great many other places.

I ran a current-version Avast scan this morning, which flagged Mozbackup 1.5.1 as having Win32Installcore-AX.

https://www.virustotal.com/file/d7f3340f67af483a1ebf0367a34c71c992800010c96e6bc472bd75...3e59/analysis/

6 out of 43 AV products flagged it as one thing, or another. (*)

Now, granted, this would be a PUP (Potentially Unwanted Program), according to Avast, which is less serious than a number of other categories.

BUT, it is the inconsistencies (*) that bug me, and undermine confidence in the "findings."

1) This item has been sitting in a download directory for several months. (I think I even ran it once.) Prior versions of Avast raised no objections to it. The Avast version in the table in the link above shows nothing.

2) 6 out of 43 is not what I'd call a high level of certainty. (Another way to say that would be, most of them found nothing.)

3) If various AV scanners cannot even agree on what the "infected" or suspicious item happens to contain, why should we necessarily believe it ? (Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't.)

Still, I'm glad that something like Virustotal exists.
This is merely one example.

[aedipuss]

i've got vtzilla installed in firefox, it allows right click virustotal website and file scan before downloading files or visiting sites.

[jman98]

I work in IT for a living. I'm going to tell the most honest answer I can give you. EVERY anti-virus product has some false alarms. Avast is always telling me about some kind of bogus Java virus. Even Kaspersky, which is a business grade product, has false alarms and those guys are among the very best anti-virus minds there are. I can't prove this, but to be honest with you I suspect that they actually like false positives because it panics inexperienced users into paying for subscriptions for the full versions. All you can do is just get a program that you like/trust and go with it.

[AaronDude]

I used several heavy anti virus programs up until last year. Microsoft SE just works well for me. It's not heavy or overkill and it runs on my crappy computers way better.

[aedipuss]

virustotal and using vtzilla is just a way for someone who's online alot to get a feel for whether or not a site is safe or a file is infected before downloading to your harddrive. an yes there are lots of false positives. here's today's scan of this site still showing one scanner showing it infected.

Normalized URL: https://www.videohelp.com/ Detection ratio: 1 / 29 Analysis date: 2012-07-16 01:16:10 UTC ( 0 minutes ago ) File scan: The URL response content could not be retrieved or it is some text format (HTML, XML, CSV, TXT, etc.), hence, it was not enqueued for antivirus scanning.
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sorry for the screwed up formatting