Kaspersky Application Advisor Tells You if a Program is Safe

When you download programs form the internet, there is always the risk of download malicious programs and programs that come bundled with potentially unwanted programs (PUP). But how would you know if a program that you have downloaded from the internet is safe or not? One way to check for the legitimacy of programs is to ask in various computer security forums or check the downloaded program against the VirusTotal online scanner database. But a better way is to use the Kaspersky Application Advisor to check for the safety level of any program.

Kaspersky Application Advisor is a web app just like VirusTotal, but instead of scanning an uploaded file, it checks for the safety of the file based on its previous known occurrence. It checks a file against the Kaspersky antivirus database as well as shows what the community thinks about a program.

In order to use the Kaspersky Application Advisor, you can visit its website in any of your favorite web browser. On this webpage, you can search a file by entering its name (for example, FontLoader.exe), its SHA-1/ MD5 hash code or just upload a file directly to the Kaspersky servers.

Kaspersky Application Advisor

After this three things can happen – it will show the file as safe in the green color, or the file will be shown as dangerous in red color, or it would simply say that the file has not been seen by Kaspersky community.

If it shows green safe checkmark and the community speaks positively about it, then you can go ahead and use that program without any worries. But if it shows a red danger warning sign, then it is time to delete that file off your system immediately.

Kaspersky Application Advisor

Conclusion: Kaspersky Application Advisor is a very helpful tool in determining the security risks involved when downloading programs from the internet. It checks the uploaded program files or typed in file hashes for malicious nature and fetches the opinions of the community about that program, making it very easy for you to decide whether you should use  that application or not.

You can visit the Kaspersky Application Advisor website at http://whitelist.kaspersky.com/advisor.