Owners of ”VirusTotal-for-Crooks” Service Arrested
Ruslans Bondars and Jurijs Martisevs, two Latvian citizens, are facing charges in the US for running a portal that allowed cybercrooks to scan and see if their malware was detected by antivirus software.Called ”no distribute scanners,” these services are similar to VirusTotal, with the main difference being that they block telemetry and don’t share scan results with antivirus vendors.”No distribute scanners” are regularly used during the process of coding a malware family as a way to make sure the malware is undetectable. They are also used just before malware authors start malware distribution campaigns, as a last check to ensure their final and ready-to-go payloads are still undetectable.
