How to Check MOV Files for Viruses, Malware, and Other Threats in Node.js

It’s unlikely that MOV file uploads or downloads will carry viruses or malware. However, we shouldn’t overlook the possibility, and it’s easy to scan these files for threats with a free API solution.

Using Node.js code examples provided below, we can easily call a free API in our Node.js form capable of scanning MOV files for threats. This API can scan dozens of other common formats, so we can expand its utility to handle a wide variety of files entering a Node.js form from a client-side upload process.

We could even use this API to block MOV files as a viable upload format entirely.

For example, if we only wanted to allow MP4 uploads in our upload process, we could set the ‘restrictFileTypes’ parameter to ‘.mp4’. This would block any files that didn’t meet MP4 formatting requirements, returning a “CleanResult”: False response (the same response generated for files containing virus or malware signatures).

We can structure our API call in a few quick steps. First things first, let’s install the client SDK via NPM install:

npm install cloudmersive-virus-api-client --save

We could also add the following snippet to our package.json:

  "dependencies": {
    "cloudmersive-virus-api-client": "^1.1.9"
  }

Lastly, we can copy the following code to call the function. We can set the ‘restrictFileTypes’ parameter here if we want to block MOV files, and we can also set ‘allowInvalidFiles’ to “false” if we want to block malformed MOV files (which could theoretically be used to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in MOV video rendering/processing programs):

var CloudmersiveVirusApiClient = require('cloudmersive-virus-api-client');
var defaultClient = CloudmersiveVirusApiClient.ApiClient.instance;

// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
var Apikey = defaultClient.authentications['Apikey'];
Apikey.apiKey = 'YOUR API KEY';



var apiInstance = new CloudmersiveVirusApiClient.ScanApi();

var inputFile = Buffer.from(fs.readFileSync("C:\\temp\\inputfile").buffer); // File | Input file to perform the operation on.

var opts = { 
  'allowExecutables': true, // Boolean | Set to false to block executable files (program code) from being allowed in the input file.  Default is false (recommended).
  'allowInvalidFiles': true, // Boolean | Set to false to block invalid files, such as a PDF file that is not really a valid PDF file, or a Word Document that is not a valid Word Document.  Default is false (recommended).
  'allowScripts': true, // Boolean | Set to false to block script files, such as a PHP files, Python scripts, and other malicious content or security threats that can be embedded in the file.  Set to true to allow these file types.  Default is false (recommended).
  'allowPasswordProtectedFiles': true, // Boolean | Set to false to block password protected and encrypted files, such as encrypted zip and rar files, and other files that seek to circumvent scanning through passwords.  Set to true to allow these file types.  Default is false (recommended).
  'allowMacros': true, // Boolean | Set to false to block macros and other threats embedded in document files, such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint embedded Macros, and other files that contain embedded content threats.  Set to true to allow these file types.  Default is false (recommended).
  'allowXmlExternalEntities': true, // Boolean | Set to false to block XML External Entities and other threats embedded in XML files, and other files that contain embedded content threats.  Set to true to allow these file types.  Default is false (recommended).
  'allowInsecureDeserialization': true, // Boolean | Set to false to block Insecure Deserialization and other threats embedded in JSON and other object serialization files, and other files that contain embedded content threats.  Set to true to allow these file types.  Default is false (recommended).
  'allowHtml': true, // Boolean | Set to false to block HTML input in the top level file; HTML can contain XSS, scripts, local file accesses and other threats.  Set to true to allow these file types.  Default is false (recommended) [for API keys created prior to the release of this feature default is true for backward compatability].
  'restrictFileTypes': "restrictFileTypes_example" // String | Specify a restricted set of file formats to allow as clean as a comma-separated list of file formats, such as .pdf,.docx,.png would allow only PDF, PNG and Word document files.  All files must pass content verification against this list of file formats, if they do not, then the result will be returned as CleanResult=false.  Set restrictFileTypes parameter to null or empty string to disable; default is disabled.
};

var callback = function(error, data, response) {
  if (error) {
    console.error(error);
  } else {
    console.log('API called successfully. Returned data: ' + data);
  }
};
apiInstance.scanFileAdvanced(inputFile, opts, callback);

To authorize our API calls, we’ll just need a free Cloudmersive API key. This will allow us to make up to 800 API calls per month with no additional commitments (our total will reset the following month once we reach it).

That’s all there is to it — no more code required! Now we can easily scan and/or disallow MOV files in a Node.js form upload process.