Beside disabling common content blockers, make sure that you haven't disabled Javascript in your browser settings, neither have you kept a Script-blocker addon (etc) enabled.
You can password-protect the samples to be submitted, mention the password, rename the archive file to some other extension (yes, I've done that when sending files to some AV companies) so that the file format does not get blocked by Gmail, then send.
Do not send samples as .EXE. For security reasons, you cannot upload certain file formats.
lolThat's why files in the Hub are posted with hxxps and xxx.somedomain.*FYI: this works for me now, I tried attaching a random small file as a test (sounds like this part of the process was where you had trouble, so didn't actually submit it)
and yes, always zip the file first before sending it as mentioned above (with pw "infected" to be safe - that pw seems to be the universal norm for sharing malware files almost everywhere, so most everyone will know how to extract it)
i doubt this is the case for bitdefender employees who check the submissions (lol) but some people have their browser setup to automatically save downloads to a certain location and then open automatically... If you send them just the straight EXE file, you can see what can happen
Of course their employees will guess the password to be "infected", the people responsible for handling the malware sample submissions were not picked out of a zoo... They do have experience and chances are they come to forums like this and use the samples from the hub too (for example) as with many other sources.
Uploaded files are first checked automatically, that's where machine learning can first group files in clusters according to different previously seen files, and when there are enough grouped files there can be picked some attributes that are common to these files while also keeping the level of hits in the clean set to none. Most of the files are automatically analyzed and the researchers don't even see them unless they play with them.Of course their employees will guess the password to be "infected", the people responsible for handling the malware sample submissions were not picked out of a zoo... They do have experience and chances are they come to forums like this and use the samples from the hub too (for example) as with many other sources.
I would assume they go through a sandbox, like Cuckoo, and then the log generated is used for the submission result. They manually analyse if required. Vendors like Emsisoft analyze their samples manually instead of relying on automatic analysis, and vendors like Avira have their submissions pass through the cloud w/ Cuckoo for example. They do things differently all the time, the way BD might do something doesn't mean they all will.. But nice post.
