Question: Does virustotal scrape data from Norton, McAfee and the 20 to 50 scanning engines they use, or do they have a paid licensing arrangement with them? [I use the term scraping loosely e.g. they could run the file against a local instance of each scanner, upload the file to other websites, etc]
Good move on their part, although I'm surprised they weren't able to create something like this in-house. Basically if you crawl every freakin' web page on the internet you pretty much should find all the bad guy's landing pages.