Alphabet Launches VirusTotal Monitor to Stop False Positives

Chronicle, the security division under Alphabet, this week released a service to stop false positives in malware scanning. VirusTotal Monitor helps developers check if antivirus tools are mistakenly identifying products as malware before they hit the market and on an ongoing basis.

False positives come with negative consequences. When benign software is flagged as malicious, developers lose revenue and pay higher support costs, antivirus vendors get poor reputations, and end users are frustrated. Even tools built in-house are prone to false positives, and while these cases don't affect revenue, it can lead to hours of lost productivity.

VirusTotal Monitor lets developers check if their software will be flagged as malware. Devs can upload their products to a private cloud store in VirusTotal, where files are scanned with all 70+ VirusTotal vendors. Files are only shared if malware is detected, in which case the software is shared with the antivirus scanner that generated an alert. 

Read more details here.

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