virustotal bot

The virustotal bot is a specialized web crawler and scanning tool for the security service VirusTotal. The service analyzes files and URLs for malicious content by checking them against dozens of antivirus engines and website scanners. When VirusTotal visits a website, it typically identifies itself with a user-agent string that includes VirusTotal. Its primary function is to aggregate the scanning capabilities of many security products to provide a comprehensive threat assessment.

The virustotal bot is crawling your website because someone has submitted your URL for analysis through the VirusTotal service. This could be a security researcher, a concerned user, or even you. The bot does not visit on a regular schedule; it only visits when a user specifically directs it to analyze a URL. These scans are generally considered an authorized use of a legitimate security service.

The purpose of the virustotal bot is to provide a comprehensive security analysis of a website. It supports internet safety by detecting malware, phishing attempts, and other security threats. The data it collects is used to generate security reports that help users determine if a site is safe to visit. For website owners, the service can be valuable as it can help identify security issues on your site that might otherwise go unnoticed, such as if your site has been compromised or is inadvertently hosting malicious content.

To prevent the virustotal bot from analyzing your site, you can add a disallow rule to your robots.txt file. However, this may not be advisable, as it could prevent a valuable security tool from identifying potential issues on your site.

To block this bot, add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: VirusTotal
Disallow: /