Ed Finker’s recent article points out an interesting extension that I was not aware of until reading about it. Although online virus checkers are not new they are relatively unknown outside of the security industry. Now one of them has a Firefox plugin that allows the user to right click on a URL and Dr. Web will analyze it for viruses. Upon further research it turns out that the home site for Dr. Web Anti-virus has plugins for most browsers.
Now, I cannot vouch for how well their service works. Only time will tell. But this is still a very cool idea that seems very useful for security professionals and the general public alike.
So, from a security prospective, the concerns would be:
- Can you trust the services virus database?
- Will the service ever, convinently, overlook spyware for paying vendors?
- Timing attacks – meaning that the remote file can change between the time it has been scanned and the time it is downloaded.
So, if you decide to use this service you should definately keep Googling for customer and industry feed back. And ALWAYS scan the file again once you have a local copy of it on your system. You should only be using Dr. Web as a second form of validation for a download and not as your primary anti-virus mechanism.
Good surfing,
Cutaway