If you ever visit Cambodia or Vietnam on a vacation, the tour guide will tell you about the land mines and unexploded bombs that are sometimes still found laying in the ground for so many years. These bombs and land mines are still active and have become unstable. This is why the local farmers take some precautions to prevent any unfortunate accidents. when walking through forest and farm lands. Downloading files from the internet is no less a fearful experience than walking in a mine field. You can download malicious files and infect your PC if you are not careful enough. Fortunately, there is a downloader program called Nugget that can check all the downloaded files against the VirusTotal database and detect malware before they can do any damage.
Nugget is a command line downloader program designed along the lines of the “cURL” downloader. It adds the benefit of checking all the downloaded files using the VirusTotal’s multiple anti-virus engine database. You can use it through a command line prompt window, or just launch it by double-clicking on the nugget.exe file and paste the URL of the file that you want to download. In order to paste the URL, you will have to right-click on the Nugget window and choose Paste.
After pasting the URL of the file that you want to download, you can press the Enter key and it will start to download the file. The downloaded file shall be placed in the same folder as the nugget.exe program. But soon after the download is finished, it is checked using the VirusTotal database. If the downloaded file is detected as malware, it is displayed in red color. It displays the total number of anti-virus engines used and the number of anti-virus engines that flagged that file as a threat (malware). If it finds that downloaded file is malicious, it renames it and appends _quarantined to that file’s extension.
Suppose, the nugget.exe file itself gets infected and becomes corrupt, how would you check its integrity? Nugget can check itself with VirusTotal too. To check Nugget itself for any malicious presence, you can just press Enter when it asks for the URL. This will initiate a self integrity check and a quick VirusTotal check for the nugget.exe file. This simple feature makes it sure that always run a clean nugget.exe file.
Conclusion: Nugget is a small command line downloader that can help you prevent downloading of malicious files that can cause damage to your PC. It simply checks VirusTotal for the downloaded files and reports any malware detected in the file.
You can download Nugget from http://trax.x10.mx/nugget/.