Raymond.CC Blog

While using NoVirusThanks online service to scan a suspicious file today, I discovered a new service developed by NoVirusThanks Company called URLVoid which was recently launched two days ago (21 May 2010). Many of us should have already heard about VirusTotal, NoVirusThanks, Jotti, VirusChief, Filterbit which allows anyone to upload a suspicious file to have it scanned with multiple up-to-date antivirus engines. As for URLVoid, it allows you to scan websites for viruses using multiple scanning engines.

Scanning websites is very different from scanning a file. The website scanners normally crawls the website and test to see if it can find any malware or spam. When found, it labels the site as dangerous. Some website scanners also takes user’s comments and ratings into consideration. Web of Trust (WoT), McAfee SiteAdvisor, Norton Safe Web are some of the website analyzers which are widely used and sometimes depending on a single service may not be accurate enough. For more accurate result, you can use URLVoid which will help you scan the URL with 9 different scanning engines.


All you need to do is enter the URL of the website that you would like to scan and click the Scan Now button.

URLVoid will then send the URL to 9 different scanning engines which are:

BrowserDefender

Google Diagnostic

MalwareDomainList

McAfee SiteAdvisor

McAfee Trusted Secure

MyWOT

Norton SafeWeb

TrendMicro Web Reputation

Web Security Guard

Once URLVoid has gotten all the results from the scanning engines, it will parse the results and presents a simple report with IP address and country of the webserver, detection percentage and status. When the website is detected by at least 2 engines it is listed as suspicious else if it is detected by more than 2 engines it is listed as dangerous. You can view the individual reports from the scanning engines by clicking on the small magnifying glass.

At the moment URLVoid has some restriction such as it can only scan domains and subdomains but not IP address and the report is cached for 10 days. This means that URLVoid will only generate a new report once every 10 days for a single website. Comments from WoT and SiteAdvisor are not taken into consideration due to possible false positives. If I am not wrong, URLVoid is the first online service that can scan website using multiple engines. Good job and keep up the good work NVT!

[ Visit URLVoid ]