One service that you did not mention was another one offered by Panda which is called Nanoscan. I have found that it works very quickly and is compatible with MS Vista as well which is also a plus.

[nanoscan.com]

Thanks
Tech-Weekly

For scanning individual files, you can’t beat [virustotal.com] – at the time of this writing they send your file through 32 different scanning engines and spit out a summary report. Very nice.

That actually looks like a great service…thanks for pointing it out.

I can see most of the scanners work with MS Internet Explorer and only one with Firefox. Neither Opera nor Safari are supported. Does it mean there are more security problems with IE than with other popular browsers?

No, that’s not really what that is indicating. It’s mostly because the virus scanners use ActiveX as the method of accessing and scanning a user’s computer, which is only offered in Internet Explorer.

The Trend Micro one above does work with Macs, but that was really the only one that I could find. The need for them just isn’t there right now, so I don’t think developers will be taking the time to create them.

Don’t think so….

From one point of view you could say that they target IE because it’s is almost sure that if you’re using Windows, you have IE installed, so, it’s easier for them to offer the product without being worried if you have a capable browser.

From another point of view, it’s easiest to develop something that works with IE (throught ActiveX), Firefox, nor Opera, nor Safari are able to use ActiveX, so, make the online scanners work with those browsers means re-evaluate the code and generate a new one for every browser.

And from a final point of view, (mine actually), they don’t seem to understand the scope of the problem, you have 6 online scanners here (pretty good ones most of them), but only one works with a non IE browser, tricky question time! — what if the browser (IE) have been hijacked? or DNS? or the hosts file have been modified to redirect every known security page to 127.0.0.1?

Those are things that happen, is very common for several infections, thus the big problem is:

- You’ve a virus, malware, spyware, hijacker, adware, bot, trojan, worm, you named it.
- Good, you’ve several virus’ online scanners =D
- *sight* IE is blocked so you can’t use those online services…./meh cry

So, if several infections (a big number of them) targets IE (and that isn’t a “not known” thing), then I think that there’s a big misconception on those online services.

LKP

I can see most of the scanners work with MS Internet Explorer and only one with Firefox. Neither Opera nor Safari are supported. Does it mean there are more security problems with IE than with other popular browsers?

Regards,

Omar.-