Gathering intel
Recipe Difficulty: Medium
Python Version: 3.5
Operating System: Any
In this recipe, we use VirusTotal, a free online virus, malware, and URL scanner, to automate the review of potentially malicious websites or files. VirusTotal maintains detailed documentation of their API on their website. We will demonstrate how to perform basic queries against their system using their documented API and store returned results into a CSV file.
Getting started
To follow this recipe, you need to first create an account with VirusTotal and decide between the free public API or the private API. The public API has request limitations, which the private API does not. For example, with the public API, we are limited to 4 requests per minute and 178,560 requests per month. More details about the different API types can be found on VirusTotal's website. We will make these API calls with the requests
library. This library can be installed using:
pip install requests==2.18.4
Note
To learn more about and use...