Pentagon starts outing APT zero-days on VirusTotal

The United States Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF) has as of this month started to upload otherwise undetected malware samples it has found to the public VirusTotal scanning service, in a new effort to share security information.

The CNMF is a unit of the US Cyber Command, operated by the Department of Defense. 

Currently, CNMF has shared four malware samples, including two variants of the Lojack Trojan used by the Russian "Fancy Bear" advanced persistent threat nation-state hacking group.

Two other pieces of malware associated with Fancy Bear have also been added to VirusTotal.

A Twitter account, USCYBERCOM Malware Alert, has also been set up by CNMF to alert when new samples are posted to VirusTotal.

Security researchers and anti-malware vendors can use the information shared by CNMF on VirusTotal to add detection for the malicious content.

VirusTotal is a free, public service that analyses files and hyperlinks for viruses, worms, trojans and other malicious content since 2004.

It runs the suspected malware through 66 free and commercial anti-virus scanners to check on detection rates, and generates and publishes unique hashes for them.

The scanning service has over half a million registered users, and was bought by Google in 2012.