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An Epidemiological Study of Malware Encounters in a Large Enterprise

Published: 03 November 2014 Publication History

Abstract

We present an epidemiological study of malware encounters in a large, multi-national enterprise. Our data sets allow us to observe or infer not only malware presence on enterprise computers, but also malware entry points, network locations of the computers (i.e., inside the enterprise network or outside) when the malware were encountered, and for some web-based malware encounters, web activities that gave rise to them. By coupling this data with demographic information for each host's primary user, such as his or her job title and level in the management hierarchy, we are able to paint a reasonably comprehensive picture of malware encounters for this enterprise. We use this analysis to build a logistic regression model for inferring the risk of hosts encountering malware; those ranked highly by our model have a >3x higher rate of encountering malware than the base rate. We also discuss where our study confirms or refutes other studies and guidance that our results suggest.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CCS '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
November 2014
1592 pages
ISBN:9781450329576
DOI:10.1145/2660267
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Publication History

Published: 03 November 2014

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Author Tags

  1. enterprise security
  2. logistic regression
  3. malware encounters
  4. measurement

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CCS '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 114 of 585 submissions, 19%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,261 of 6,999 submissions, 18%

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  • (2024)Unveiling the Connection Between Malware and Pirated Software in Southeast Asian Countries: A Case StudyIEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society10.1109/OJCS.2024.33645765(62-72)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2023)One size does not fit allProceedings of the 32nd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3620237.3620555(5683-5700)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Prioritizing Remediation of Enterprise Hosts by Malware Execution RiskProceedings of the 39th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference10.1145/3627106.3627180(550-564)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
  • (2023)A Comparison of Systemic and Systematic Risks of Malware Encounters in Consumer and Enterprise EnvironmentsACM Transactions on Privacy and Security10.1145/356536226:2(1-30)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2023
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  • (2023)Infection Risk Prediction and ManagementEncyclopedia of Cryptography, Security and Privacy10.1007/978-3-642-27739-9_1634-1(1-5)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2023
  • (2022)Protection of Critical Infrastructure Using an Integrated Cybersecurity Risk Management (i-CSRM) Framework5G Internet of Things and Changing Standards for Computing and Electronic Systems10.4018/978-1-6684-3855-8.ch004(94-133)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2022
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  • (2022)Foreseer: Efficiently Forecasting Malware Event Series with Long Short-Term Memory2022 IEEE International Symposium on Secure and Private Execution Environment Design (SEED)10.1109/SEED55351.2022.00016(97-108)Online publication date: Sep-2022
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