How to Scan EXE Executable Files for Virus and Malware Signatures in Node.js

Executable files — especially EXE on Windows — are ideal vehicles for a wide range of virus and malware attacks. We should always scan EXE files for threats when they enter any part of our system.

Using Node.js code examples provided below, we can call a free API that allows us to flexibly scan executable files for viruses and malware in any of our Node.js applications.

This can help create some important redundancy in our security architecture, ensuring malicious EXE files don’t make it into sensitive locations where they can execute and cause harm.

We can structure our API call easily with a few lines of code — and that starts with installing the SDK. We can install via NPM install by running the following command:

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

Or we can add the following snippet to our package.json:

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

To call the function, we can copy the below code examples:

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

The last thing we’ll need is a free Cloudmersive API key to authorize our API calls. With a free API key, we’ll be able to make up to 800 API calls per month with no commitments (ideal for smaller-scale traffic through any given application).