Hi Mindblower, thanks for the holiday greetings and wishing the same back.

I’m not mentioning a process. I’d say to reread the post. But, quickly, VT stores a copy of everything submitted and any paid VT user can view these.

So, say you get a email from your brother with 2 attachments. The first he tells you is a file he torrented from some site which promises to unlock that expensive piece of software you can not afford. The second is a self extracting archive file with the bitcoin keys repaying that $100,000 loan you gave him.

The first file you may have wanted to scan with VT. If you scan the second file with VT, thousands of extremely computer literate people in the VT community will have access to that file from the VT database and you may find that one of them transferred the bitcoin funds before you could.

Hi Eliott,
Everything I wrote in the article applies to that program which is just submitting your file to VirusTotal for you.

I will add VirusTotal also doesn’t always show all results from AVs. AVs often use multiple layers of security and not all included in VirusTotal results.

I’ve also heard of cyber criminals trying to use it to determine if their malware is going to be flagged

Thanks AJ, PeStudio just submits hashes of executable files to VT. Checking EXE’s, even the full file, in VT is probably safe since in most likely does not contain sensitive data. However, using something like PeStudio which just sends a hash will be faster then sending a file (assuming the executable is already in VT’s database) since you will not need to upload a whole file.

Thanks for the comment Reg. Actually, in this case, it is not the corporates or governments that have data on you. If you load a file with sensitive data, it is the VT community. This could consist of a individual in his basement up to security experts in those corporations or governments. If you load a file with sensitive data in it, they can see it (and possible use it in negative ways).