Disclosure · SafeScan Now earns commissions when readers buy through certain links. We never accept paid rankings — see our methodology.
Read full disclosureFive tools, free, no sign-up, no email gate. Built and hosted by an antivirus review publication that does not sell antivirus — so the answers each tool gives you can point at any product, including 'you don't need one.'
Direct answer
SafeScan Now runs five free security utilities: an antivirus finder quiz that maps your usage profile to a shortlist of suitable brands, a free online URL/file scanner that checks against 70+ engines via the VirusTotal API, a phishing URL tester, a password strength checker, and a real-time threat map. Two are live in Phase 1; three launch in Phase 2 and 3.
Most 'free antivirus tool' pages on Google are gated lead magnets. Submit your email, get a five-second checker, get added to a vendor mailing list. We built the inverse. Each tool below runs in your browser, returns an answer in seconds, and links you to the public methodology behind that answer. Nothing is gated. Nothing is upsold.
30 seconds. 5 questions. A shortlist, not a sponsored list.
Five quick questions about platform, household size, use case, budget and privacy posture. The quiz maps your answers to candidate antivirus brands using the same scoring matrix that runs our /best-antivirus/ rankings — not an affiliate-weighted recommendation engine.
Use it when: You want a 30-second shortlist before reading the long-form review.
Submit a URL or file. Get verdicts from 70+ engines.
A browser-based scanner that submits the URL or file hash you provide to the VirusTotal API and returns the consensus across more than 70 antivirus and threat-intel engines. Useful when a single antivirus is silent but you still feel a file is wrong.
Use it when: You have one suspicious file or one suspicious link and you want a second opinion.
Paste a URL. Get a phishing-likelihood score and the indicators behind it.
Phishing-specific signal extraction (lookalike characters, recent domain registration, mismatched display text, certificate age, hosting-provider fingerprints) layered on top of the VirusTotal verdict. Designed for people who are about to click and want a 5-second sanity check.
Use it when: You're about to click a link in an email and you want to test it first.
Estimate crack time and check against the HIBP breach corpus — locally, in your browser.
Runs entirely in your browser. Combines a zxcvbn-style entropy estimate with a k-anonymity Have-I-Been-Pwned lookup so we never see the password you typed. Returns a crack-time estimate, a breach hit-count, and a per-character explanation.
Use it when: You're choosing a new password and you want to know whether it's already in a breach corpus.
A reader-facing visualisation of the global malware traffic our partners observe.
A live world map of malware detections aggregated from public threat-intel feeds (CERT bulletins, Spamhaus DROP, Abuse.ch URLhaus). Updates every fifteen minutes. Useful for context — not for personal protection decisions.
Use it when: You want context for a story or a curiosity check, not a personal scan.
How they're built
Two principles run through every tool: nothing is gated and the answer points wherever the data points. The Antivirus Finder Quiz can recommend Microsoft Defender (free, built into Windows) over a paid product when the inputs warrant it. The Online Scanner can return a clean verdict on a file your installed antivirus flagged. We do not weight outputs to favour affiliate-monetised brands.
All tools that handle user-submitted material (URLs, files, passwords) explain their data flow on the tool page itself. Where a third-party API is involved (VirusTotal for the scanner, HIBP for the password checker), we name the provider, link the privacy policy, and disclose the per-request data we share. Phase 3 tools that run entirely client-side say so explicitly.
Phase 1 ready
Try the Antivirus Finder Quiz now — 30 seconds, 7 questions, no email.
FAQ
If a question is missing, write to corrections@safescannow.com and we will add and answer it on the page.