Virus Total Context Menu

Many of you are likely familiar with VirusTotal, a website that aggregates multiple scan engines and allows you to upload files in order to ensure they are malware-free. If you use this service often, an easier way to upload items can definitely come in handy.

Virus Total Context Menu is a small application that performs a simple function: it adds a new option to the context menu, enabling you to upload files to VirusTotal, using your default web browser, with only a couple of mouse clicks.

Apps that add new items to the context menu often make it quite difficult to remove them, but that isn’t the case with this tool. You only need to run the app once to register the context menu option, and then again to remove it.

However, you should keep in mind that the application needs to be registered again if you decide to move the executable file to a new location.

As you probably know, files larger than 128MB cannot be uploaded to VirusTotal from the web interface; if you use the newly-added context menu item, the size limit is even lower: any file above 32MB cannot be uploaded for scanning. Also, only up to four requests can be made per minute, but this shouldn’t be an issue for most users.

An important thing to note is that you cannot request a rescan if a file has already been uploaded previously, even if the last scan is very old. Since virus definitions are updated daily, and new threats could be detected during a subsequent scan, this is not ideal.

Overall, Virus Total Context Menu is very easy to install and use, but the API restrictions may be a deal-breaker for potential users. It is worth a look if you frequently need to scan small files, but not being able to force a rescan is a pretty big drawback.