Best Antivirus Software... 40X!!!

"Best antivirus program" is a label as good as "best husband" or "best car in the world" and if you're not one of those fanatics who can be found here and there I am sure you will agree with me that there's no such thing because each computer user has different needs so what's great for me won't be that great for my mother. I've been through this countless times so I know what I say here!

The idea of this article came to me a few hours ago when I got through Raymond's Blog and I found his article about how to Scan Files With 22 Antivirus Without Downloading to Computer. When I saw the title I was almost sure he's going to write about VirusTotal but since he didn't... here I am!

VirusTotal is a great Web-based antivirus service (OK that may sound a bit strange yo can also call it "online antivirus scanner" and you can't go wrong) that will scan anything you throw at it using no less than 40 antiviruses including a bunch of programs I never heard of like Fortinet Ikarus Prevx or... believe it or not some antiviral piece of code simply called TheHacker! ;)

The notorious names in the list include NOD32 Panda PCTools BitDefender AVG Avast TrendMicro as well as a bunch of others. I won't give you the entire list here since there's a very easy way to take a look at it... because all you need to do is scan a file!

To scan a file with VirusTotal you don't need any special skills and you can even recommend it to people who don't have a clue about the English language since this service is available in over 25 languages including French Italian Dutch Polish Spanish Russian Chinese and so on.

First you have to upload a file (SSL upload option also available) then wait for it to arrive on the remote server get scanned all the way up and down and finally check the result.

Sometimes the same file could have been scanned already and when this happens you are given the choice to check the scan results available or scan the file once again.

At last you will get to see the result of each individual scan including the version of the database and the date of last update for each antivirus in the list as you can see in the screenshot below.

I guess you know now why did I choose this title and I will conclude by saying two things: the best antivirus software isn't actually a software but the user and his/her actions and while VirusTotal may be a nice package of 40 antiviral pieces of code there's only one thing keeping viruses away from any smart user that being KNOWLEDGE!

This is it folks I hope you enjoyed finding out about this great online antivirus scanner so please drop a comment below and let me know what else would you like to know. Even if you hated this article drop a comment and tell me why. After all it's not about writing the perfect stuff it's all about getting better and better with each new article... ;)