Google Uses Reputation To Detect Malicious Downloads

CowboyRobot writes "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."

Comments

Re:Business karma

[14erCleaner]

As TFA notes, Microsoft sends information on all scanned files back to a central server, but Google does local evaluation and only sends back info on suspected malware. From a privacy standpoint, there's a big difference between the two.