VirusTotal detonates files in virtual controlled environments to trace their activities and communications, producing detailed reports including opened, created and written files, created mutexes, registry keys set, contacted domains, URL lookups, etc. This execution activity is indexed in a faceted fashion in order to allow for instantaneous lookups.

Dynamic analysis capabilities do not only focus on execution traces but also on running static+dynamic analysis plugins to decode RAT malware configs and extract network infrastructure that may have not been observed during real time execution.

VirusTotal integrates external behavioural engines sandboxes. The list of external partners can be found here.

Find below a description about our in-house sandboxes:

Box Of Apples

MacOS sandbox hooking system calls.

OS X Sandbox

MacOS 11.6 Sandbox.

VirusTotal Droidy

VirusTotal Android Sandbox. The API logging is inspired by droidmon.

VirusTotal Jujubox

Windows dynamic analysis sandbox. Frida is used for hooking and tracking Windows API calls.

VirusTotal Observer

Windows sysmon based sandbox.

VirusTotal R2DBox

R2DBox is an Android 8 sandbox which uses Frida to make the hooks. It  runs on GCE machines.

Zenbox

Windows 10 Sandbox. It provides MITRE matrix, signature detection and memory dumps. Runs on GC VmwareEngine.

ZIP files without password will be processed executing the first binary found within the ZIP.

ZIP files with password will be processed only if  the password is "infected".

Zenbox Android

Supports APKs up to Android 12 (SDK 30).

Zenbox Linux

Supports X86,  X86_64, ARM, MIPS.

ZIP files without password will be processed executing the first binary found within the ZIP.

ZIP files with password will be processed only if  the password is "infected".

Zenbox macOS

MacOS ARM Sandbox.

CAPA

Extraction of behaviour capabilities with Mandiant CAPA

CAPE Sandbox

Windows Sandbox using CAPEv2

CAPE Linux

Linux Sandbox using CAPEv2

Cuckoofork

Windows XP Sandbox.