Approached some AV companies

[Walter]

Hi again all,

I sent off some quick emails today to
the following AV companies asking if
they might be interested in donating
licenses to us in exchange for 'scanned
by' notes by the download links.

The reasoning for doing this was that
since we have to rebuild the downloads
archive anyway (necessitating re-assembling
copies of software from various potentially
untrusted sources), scanning with one or
more current AV products couldn't hurt,
and would contribute to differentiating
HOTU from smaller / less careful sites out
there.

Companies approached by email were:
- AVG
- BitDefender
- CentralCommand (Vexira)
- Frisk (F-Prot)
- McAfee (VirusScan)

Hopefully we can get multiple companies
interested for better coverage, though it
may be none, anyway it doesn't hurt to
ask.

- Walter

[Andrew Armstrong]

Make use of Clam AV, which usually is just used for email gateway
scanning and can be repurposed for website use. Won't hurt anyway.

Andrew

[FrostyC]

You could just upload the files to Virustotal.com & link the result
page next to download link. Virustotal has the MD5 sums I think so the
downloader could check to make sure that the Virustotal link is indeed
the same file if they were suspicious.
Virustotal uses lots of scanning engines...

I used to have a small explorer extension where I could right click on
any file & the context menu had an option to "Upload to Virustotal".
Maybe something like that would make it easier to do. But uploading
thousands of files to the site will be very time consuming... I dunno,
just an idea. Maybe it will spawn a better idea...

[David Ryskalczyk]

Hmm ... you could use ClamAV. It's not the most efficient, but it will
catch most Windows viruses (and is what many mail servers use). Also
it's free software.

I'm afraid a site like Virustotal would cut you off after a certain
number of files.

--Dave