Is this file safe? Re-launch of the Emsisoft Anti-Malware Network

The Emsisoft Anti-Malware Network is an online database that stores information about all types of programs, not only good ones but also bad ones – better known as “Malware”. The database is used by our Emsisoft Anti-Malware and Emsisoft Internet Security to perform online lookups of suspicious programs, but may also be freely searched by anyone at www.isthisfilesafe.com.

>200,000 new threats every day

Since its launch 4 years ago, the database has grown to more than 160 million entries, while 200,000 – 300,000 new ones are being added every single day. Collecting data about individual programs has a number of advantages:

• Speed
  The detection signatures for our Malware scanner are updated every hour. Sounds like a quite safe interval? It isn’t. Each hour our systems notice about 10,000 new threats. However, there is a practical interval limit for publishing software updates because we don’t want you to have massive online traffic just to keep your protection software up to date all day long. That’s why we have developed behavior blocking technology that is able to detect new threats by their behavior rather than by signatures/fingerprints. To improve the detection results of the behavior blocker, each alerted program is looked up online with the Emsisoft Anti-Malware Network database that in most cases already has valuable information available to clearly decide whether an alert is legit or not.
• Reputation
  Knowing meta data such as the date of first sighting, countries of origin, reported potentially malicious behaviors and verified source information is very helpful to determine the overall safety state of programs. A complex and dynamically optimized algorithm uses these parameters to calculate a safety rating.
• Avoiding false alerts
  Example: If a program’s origin can be verified and linked with a software vendor that has a strong reputation in the industry, is more than a year old and has never shown any bad behaviors but starts to get detected by the signature scanner, it is likely a false alert. In these situations our lab is immediately informed and can take proper measures to confirm or remove the affected detection signature.

Browse the database for free

Unless most cloud databases of antivirus vendors, the Emsisoft Anti-Malware Network database can be viewed by anyone publicly. You can search specific programs by their filename, company, product, description, or by their MD5 or SHA-1 hashes. With the recent re-launch the website was visually integrated with the Emsisoft website.

Note: If you’re a software developer and want to get access to the database via API, please get in touch with our sales team to receive a quote.