from the If-you-lie-down-with-dogs-you-get-up-with-fleas dept.
Using data about Web sites, IP addresses and domains, researchers find that they can detect 99 percent of malicious executables downloaded by users, outperforming antivirus and URL-reputation services. The system, known as Content-Agnostic Malware Protection or CAMP, triages up to 70 percent of executable files on a user’s system, sending attributes of the remaining files that are not known to be benign or malicious to an online service for analysis, according to a paper (pdf) presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) in February. While the system uses a blacklist and whitelist on the user’s computer to initially detect known good or bad files, the CAMP service utilizes a number of other characteristics, including the download URL, the Internet address of the server providing the download, the referrer URL, and any certificates attached to the download.
