VirusTotal Has a Free API — Scan Files, URLs, and Domains for Malware (4 Requests/Min)

The Security Tool Every Developer Should Know VirusTotal scans files and URLs against 70+ antivirus engines simultaneously. Their free API gives you 4 requests per minute — enough for security automation in small projects. Setup import requests import hashlib API_KEY = " your_virustotal_api_key " # Free at virustotal.com BASE = " https://www.virustotal.com/api/v3 " HEADERS = { " x-apikey " : API_KEY } Scan a URL import base64 def scan_url ( url ): # Submit URL for scanning r = requests . post ( f " { BASE } /urls " , headers = HEADERS , data = { " url " : url }) # Get the URL ID url_id = base64 . urlsafe_b64encode ( url . encode ()). decode (). strip ( " = " ) # Get results r = requests . get ( f " { BASE } /urls/ { url_id } " , headers = HEADERS ) stats = r . json ()[ " data " ][ " attributes " ][ " last_analysis_stats " ] return { " malicious " : stats [ " malicious " ], " suspicious " : stats [ " suspicious " ], " harmless " : stats [ " harmless " ], " undetected " : stats [ " undet