Malicious and Harmless Software in the Domain of System Utilities

Abstract

The focus of malware research is often directed on behaviour and features of malicious samples that stand out the most. However, our previous research led us to see that some features typical for malware may occur in harmless software as well. That finding guided us to direct more attention towards harmless samples and more detailed comparisons of malware and harmless software properties. To eliminate variables that may influence the results, we narrowed down our research study to specific software domain - system maintenance and utility tools. We analysed 100 malicious and 100 harmless samples from this domain and statistically evaluated how they differ regarding packing, program sections and their entropies, amount of code outside common sections and we also looked at differences in behaviour from the high-level view.