VirusTotal Command-Line tool

Google's VirusTotal (VT) online service is probably the most popular choice for malware scans by both home and business users. Through its web interface, individual files or suspicious URLs can be submitted for analysis with a few clicks. VT examines them with scanning engines from multiple providers, runs dynamic and static analyses, and compiles all the information into a detailed report.

However, beyond simple use cases, the service's graphical interface quickly reaches its limits. For example, if you want to scan the contents of an entire folder as quickly as possible in case of malware infection. Or if, during a breach, you want to know if some of the suspicious IP addresses from your logs have already appeared in previous VT analyses.

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The “VirusTotal Command-Line Interface”, or vt-cli for short, will save you time from time-consuming individual uploads or search queries in such situations. The command-line utility decouples VirusTotal’s functionality from the web interface, gaining direct access to the underlying API. This allows you to use VT’s scanning and searching features through simple terminal commands, while also customizing the results to your individual needs.

You can run quick bulk scans with the free tool, available for Linux, Windows, and macOS, filter results, and search the VT platform for information on specific threats. It also provides details on how developers can use vt-cli to create VirusTotal query scripts.

Download and install

vt-cli is an official VirusTotal project whose source code is hosted on GitHub. The fastest way to get it running on your system is to use the pre-compiled binaries. Currently, version 1.2.0 is available.

No installation required: After extracting the standalone “vt” application, simply place the file in the folder you want to scan and start it with the command line command vt init.

Those who prefer to compile the project programmed in Go themselves can follow the brief instructions in Readme.MD.

After entering your personal API key you can get started with vt-cli.

The vt-cli documentation contains usage examples that cleverly and practically combine the provided VirusTotal functions with Unix commands such as cat or grep. To use these examples unchanged on Windows, the vt-cli developers additionally recommend installing the free Cygwin runtime environment . The Cygwin terminal understands Unix commands and, according to the vt-cli team, also offers performance advantages over the standard Windows console when outputting large amounts of text.

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