Artemis and VirusTotal

Artemis was a Greek Goddess of hunt, forests and hills (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis). It is also a name for McAfee’s new “always-on,” real-time protection technology (http://www.mcafee.com/artemis) which is now available, without charge, in many of the latest McAfee products.

The legendary home of Greek Gods is the mount Olympus – the highest mountain in Greece.

Well, today Artemis reached another new level – I am very glad to let you know that VirusTotal (a free service run by Spanish company Hispasec through http://www.virustotal.com) have just added Artemis scanning to their portal. So, as of today, instead of just one command-line scanner, the basic detection technology from McAfee Avert Labs, we will be represented by two scanners. They are labeled “McAfee” and “McAfee+Artemis”. Here is how it looks in the VirusTotal portal:

Let us have a close look at this malware sample. We first saw it this morning at 06:35 UTC. Artemis recorded 32 instances of this file before it was analyzed and detection was added to Artemis. Since that moment and until now (~8 hours after first sighting) we saw 586 more samples. These samples, of course, were all successfully detected and blocked. The map shows geographical distribution of the Artemis clients that sent a fingerprint of this malware to the Avert servers.

White dots represent initial submissions (32 of them). Red dots – the blocked ones (586 of them).

Thanks to our colleagues at Hispasec for adding our Artemis technology to their site. This provides a great service to the public and to our Avert Labs researchers!