- Feb 7, 2023
- 2,355
The signatures of each vendor on VirusTotal don't necesarily have to be what's deployed on a wide-scale production environments.Did you know that the signature engines on VirusTotal are not the ones that are in the consumer and enterprise products (this has always been the case)? Did you know that vendors copy each others' signatures from VirusTotal (Proven by Eugene Kaspersky and his team)?
VirusTotal is the ideal playground to test detection methods before they are pushed to customers.
This is not a secret to anyone and is made clear on VirusTotal.
Copying signatures is impossible as most (not all, for example I've managed to view the database of some Indian AVs like NetProtect) are encrypted and current computing methods will be unable to break the encryption, for a company to view the signatures. Whether or not memory dumping can help extract them, I've not tested and can't say. The tops names would definitely implement proper anti-debug logics.
It is possible for malware analysts and even automated systems to view detections on VirusTotal and copy the detections names, which are in no way protected by the law (not considered proprietary intelligence). Also, many vendors use third-party feeds, which is where similarities may have been derived from. But what they copy is the name, not the signature itself.
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