A Closer Look at Unpopular Software Downloads and the Risks They Pose to OrganizationsAs a large cyber security vendor, Trend Micro deals with millions of threat data per day. Our Smart Protection Network (SPN), among other technologies, helps us conduct research and investigate new threats and cybercrimes to improve our ability to protect our customers.
In this blog post, the first of a three-part series, I would like to share some insights on trends that we have observed in the wild after analyzing 3 million software downloads, involving hundreds of thousands of internet-connected machines.
Specifically, we turn our focus on web downloads originating from browsers or any other (HTTP) client application installed on a machine. Note that we limited the study to machines that execute software after download. Given the huge quantity of data, we also limited our research to unpopular software downloaded from URLs that were not whitelisted. This automatically excludes software from Windows Updates and other well-known domains. All this information is PII anonymized.
We classify these downloads as benign (legitimate software), malicious or unknown. Unknown means that the downloaded software is currently unknown to us or to other public data sources that we monitor.
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A Closer Look at Unpopular Software Downloads and the Risks They Pose to Organizations
