When browsing in your Firefox web browser, sometimes you end up on malicious sites or click on links that take you to possibly infected files. For full protection against such events, we recommend that you install a full fledged antivirus product such as ESET Antivirus on your computer that can scan web data over HTTP and HTTPS protocols. These antivirus products can stop the malware before it can be downloaded on your computer.
However, if you want a quick opinion about a file or link from the popular VirusTotal multi-antivirus engine scanner, then you can install VT4Browsers extension in your Firefox web browser. This extension is also available for the Google Chrome web browser.
After the installation of this extension, you will find a new icon in the browser toolbar. We can click on this icon to open the settings for the VT4Browsers. From these settings, we can enable scanning downloads with VirusTotal, avoid scanning of DOCX/PDF and display Send to VirusTotal whenever downloading new files from the internet.
For the VT Augment settings, we need to create a VirusTotal account (which is free) and get the API key from your own VirusTotal key. Only after adding this API key from your VirusTotal account, we can enable and use the VT Augment options.
Other than scanning the downloaded files, we can use this extension for scanning any link, website or online file. For this, we can right-click on any link and choose an appropriate option from under the VT4Browsers sub-menu. Various options that are available include – scan selected link, scan selected page, insert/hash for search and more. Using this option, we can choose to scan for a file for which we already know the SHA-1, SHA-256 or MD5 hash.
You can get the VT4Browsers extension for the Firefox web browser from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vt4browsers/.