Sigcheck and VirusTotal

Published: 2015-07-17
Last Updated: 2015-07-20 09:05:42 UTC
by Didier Stevens (Version: 1)
8 comment(s)

Continuing my diary entries on Sysinternals tools with VirusTotal support, I'm taking a look at sigcheck.

Sigcheck is a command-line utility to check the digital signature of files like PE files (EXEs).

Sigcheck also supports VirusTotal searches. When you use option -v, the hash of the file will be submitted to VirusTotal. The first time you run it, you'll have to accept VirusTotal's terms (or use option -vt to accept and avoid the prompt):

You'll get the score and a link to the report for the checked file.

If a hash is not present in VirusTotal's database, the file will not be submitted, unless you use option -vs:

You can scan a complete disk with option -s and specifying the root folder of the disk (e.g. c:\), and you can produce a CSV report with option -c:

As can be seen from this last screenshot, files without digital signature are also checked with VirusTotal.

Sysinternals: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals

VirusTotal: https://www.virustotal.com/

Didier Stevens
Microsoft MVP Consumer Security
blog.DidierStevens.com DidierStevensLabs.com

8 comment(s)

Comments

Great tip. Really enjoy the virus total diary entries.


Besides digital signatures, "sigcheck -h" can be used to compute MD5, SHA1 and SHA256 checksums.
A convenient feature for validating downloads.
loving the virus total / sysinternals tips.
" You can scan a complete disk with option -s and specifying the root folder of the disk (e.g. c:\)"

Is this safe and efficient, or is it going to wind up uploading all my documents and 800gb ISO files to VirusTotal,
or making a HTTP request for every file on my hard disk?

E.g. Is "scanning a complete disk" actually advisable?
Like I wrote, there are no uploads unless you explicitly instruct this with option -vs
The example for the complete disk is without uploads.
Virustotal has a private API and operates a commercial (premium) service, so obviously this is not unlimited use. For corporate users, at what point does this become a TOS violation?
Sigcheck uses VirusTotal's Public API, not the Private API.
My ip got blocked by virustotal while I was scanning my drive, any suggestions what I can do about it?
VirusTotal cannot block an IP address. A 3rd party tool could decide to block an IP addresses based on the information returned by the VirusTotal API.

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