You may get suspicious email attachments even from your friends. So what you can do is discard the email or download the attachment and scan it for virus. First one may not work if the email is a useful one. And second one have a risk factor, it may contain a virus which will affect your computer badly, So what will you do ?
Here is an option for that you can do, in this you can confirm whether the email have an infected attachment or not with out downloading it.
1. Forward the suspicious email to scan@virustotal.com with the attachment (file must not exceed 10 MB in size).
2. remove the whole email content except attachment.
3. Change the subject line to SCAN.
4. You will get a virus report in few minutes.
You need not to download the attachment and this will scan your attachment in multiple anti-virus softwares.
If you want to scan a file in your machine,
1. Write SCAN in the Subject field.
2. Attach the file to be scanned. Such file must not exceed 10 MB in size. If the attached file is larger, the system will reject it automatically.
3. You will receive an email with a report of the file analysis. Response time will vary depending on the load of the system at the time of placing your request.
or
1. Go to virustotal.com.
2. upload your file and scan.
or
You can download a tool from virus total which will add a menu item in the context menu and this will be very handy to send a file in your machine to scan.
download it here.
this will upload the file to the virus total.
Here is a list of Anti-virus softwares used in this Virus Total.
- AhnLab (V3).
- Aladdin (eSafe).
- ALWIL (Avast! Antivirus).
- Authentium (Command Antivirus).
- Avira (AntiVir).
- Bit9 (FileAdvisor).
- Cat Computer Services (Quick Heal).
- ClamAV (ClamAV).
- CA Inc. (Vet).
- Doctor Web, Ltd. (DrWeb).
- Eset Software (ESET NOD32).
- ewido networks (ewido anti-malware).
- Fortinet (Fortinet).
- FRISK Software (F-Prot).
- F-Secure (F-Secure).
- AVG Technologies (AVG).
- Hacksoft (The Hacker).
- Ikarus Software (Ikarus).
- Kaspersky Lab (AVP).
- McAfee (VirusScan).
- Microsoft (Malware Protection).
- Norman (Norman Antivirus).
- Panda Security (Panda Platinum).
- Prevx (Prevx1).
- Rising Antivirus (Rising).
- Secure Computing (Webwasher).
- Softwin (BitDefender).
- Sophos (SAV).
- Sunbelt Software (Antivirus).
- Symantec (Norton Antivirus).
- VirusBlokAda (VBA32).
- VirusBuster (VirusBuster).
here is a scan result
This is very handy thing. Try it out. And the following is from the virus total website
ATTENTION: VirusTotal is a free service offered by Hispasec Sistemas. There are no guarantees about the availability and continuity of this service. Although the detection rate afforded by the use of multiple antivirus engines is far superior to that offered by just one product, these results DO NOT guarantee the harmlessness of a file. Currently, there is not any solution that offers a 100% effectiveness rate for detecting viruses and malware.