I always like Virus Total as a second line of defense,
However, why isn’t Avast listed in the URL detection sensors anymore like it used it to be? Wouldn’t such protection still be counted by the scanner when Avast’s web-shield does the scanning? There’s a lot of AV scanners that Virus Total doesn’t use anymore for URL scans. But from what I understand, if you upload a file to Virus Total, you’ll get all the different AV scanners like it was in the past.
It never was on the URL detections, at first there were only 6 companies in the URL scan and avast doesn’t have a specific URL link scanner, so it would have to be something else. e.g. a live scan. VT is generally on-demand scans and many of there so called URL scanners are just referring to their database to see if the url is on it.
Personally I feel that the URL scan in VT is pretty poor, there are better specialist live url scanners.
But the web shield isn’t available for off-line on-demand scans, e.g. just throw a url at it, it doesn’t function in that way. It doesn’t take the place of a URL scanner as it doesn’t do the same thing so can’t be compared, you can’t for instance right click on a url and have the web shield scan it.
The web shield I feel is probably the best shield in avast as the greatest majority of malware now comes from the internet, much of that from hacked sites or exploits and the web shield is very hot on those.