VirusTotal Scanning
What is it?
VirusTotal Scanning is the process by which Admin By Request (ABR) validates its own software release binaries against 70+ antivirus engines before any update reaches customers. Before a new ABR version is deployed for download, the binary files are uploaded to ABR's VirusTotal Monitor account and inspected across every engine in VirusTotal's scanning network. No release file is pushed to production until all engines pass.
Additionally, ABR keeps the three most recent releases in its VirusTotal Monitor account and re-scans all of them every day. If any engine begins flagging an older binary as a result of a newly added signature, ABR is notified immediately and works with the flagging vendor to add the file to their approval list before customers encounter a problem. The goal of this process is straightforward: every file a customer downloads from ABR has already been validated as clean by more than 70 independent scanning engines. This is ABR's supply chain security commitment, documented in its Data Security specification and applicable to all platforms.
VirusTotal Scanning is available to all platforms (Windows, macOS and Linux) and all ABR agent binaries are subject to the scanning process.
Every ABR release is cleared by 70+ engines before it ships
ABR scans its own binaries through VirusTotal Monitor at release time - then re-scans the last three releases every day, so a new signature that starts flagging an older file is caught and resolved with the vendor before customers ever see it
What problem does it solve?
When you download and install any software from a vendor, you are extending trust to that vendor. For security software in particular - and ABR is exactly that - the stakes of misplaced trust are high. A compromised installer that ships malware alongside a legitimate product is one of the more insidious attack vectors in the threat landscape: the user runs the install with administrator privileges precisely because the software is supposed to manage privileged access.
VirusTotal Scanning addresses this from ABR's side of the equation by making the following guarantee:
No ABR binary ships to customers until it has been independently validated as clean by 70+ antivirus engines.
This is not a sample check or spot audit - it is a hard gate on every release.
There is a second, equally practical problem that VirusTotal Scanning helps manage: false positives on already-deployed binaries. Antivirus engines add new signatures continuously. A binary that passed all 70+ engines at release time may be flagged by one of those engines weeks later, when a new signature update adds a detection rule that happens to match a benign code pattern in an ABR file. If ABR only ran a one-time scan before release, there would be no mechanism to detect this drift - customers would start seeing unexpected AV alerts and quarantine events on their ABR installations, and ABR would have no early warning. The daily re-scan of the last three releases gives ABR exactly that early warning system.
The last three releases stay under watch
Signatures change daily. ABR keeps a rolling window of its three newest releases and re-scans every one against all 70+ engines, every day, using the latest signature databases. A file that shipped clean can be flagged weeks later - this is how ABR finds out first.
