How do the different detection engines work?

Scanii is a content detection service capable of detecting a variety of content, depending on the enabled detection engine. Content detection engines can be enabled (and disabled) on a per API key basis, giving you a large number of configuration options.

Malware

Our malware detection engine is Scanii's original detection engine and has evolved considerably over the years. We believe that our detection rate is as good as that of our commercial competitors, but our performance and ease-of-use are unmatched.

We can confidently say that, due to our redundant engine setup where we pair our own engine with a top-tier commercial engine fallback, we OEM Sophos for that fallback engine.

With that said, we encourage all of our customers to not take our word for it, but instead to create a free Scanii account and try it for themselves.

Other items to keep in mind:

• If the file you send us for processing is an archive (Zip, Gzip, RAR, etc.), we will expand/decompress and analyze the contents individually as long as the archive is not password-protected.
• Our malware engine is a meta engine that utilizes multiple distinct malware detection engines/products to increase overall accuracy. Today, we pair our own engine with a top-tier commercial engine.
• Like all other malware engines, our engine properly identifies the EICAR test file.

Limits

• All file types are supported.
• The maximum practical limit for a single file is less than 2GB.

Samples

• Like pretty much all malware engines available today, our engine responds to the  EICAR test file sample.
• You can find sample office documents with the EICAR pattern embedded in them here.

NSFW Image

NSFW stands for "not safe for work" and NSFW Image is a brand new custom content detection engine designed from the ground up to utilize the lastest in artificial intelligence and computer vision to detect adult, offensive or otherwise inappropriate images.

Worried about inappropriate images being accidentally shared by your users? Turn this detection engine on and say goodbye to that risk.

Samples

• Today we do no provide a sample test file for NSFW image but they are quite easy to come by

Limits

• Supports over 100+ image file types (detailed list here) 
• Max single file practical limit 4MB
• Recommended image size: at least 640x480

NSFW Language

NSFW language detection allow you to detect profane, offensive or otherwise inappropriate language across virtually all files types including images, that's right, you can send us phone camera image of a document containing adult language and it will be detected accordingly - oh and we forgot to mention that this detection works across 23 languages.

NSFW language database is open source, utilities the amazing open source YARA format and is available at https://github.com/uvasoftware/yara-language-nsfw.

Samples

• Today we do no provide a sample test file for NSFW language but any word document (or any other textual format) with a bad word in it will be properly identified

Limits

• All file types supported
• Max single file practical limit < 100MB
• No handwritten text support