Shedding Light on the Targeted Victim Profiles of Malicious Downloaders
François Labrèche, Enrico Mariconti, Gianluca Stringhini · Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security · 2022
Malware affects millions of users worldwide, impacting the daily lives of many people as well as businesses. Malware infections are increasing in complexity and unfold over a number of stages. A malicious downloader often acts as the starting point as it fingerprints the victim’s machine and downloads one or more additional malware payloads. Although previous research was conducted on these malicious downloaders and their Pay-Per-Install networks, limited work has investigated how the profile of the victim machine, e.g., its characteristics and software configuration, affect the targeting choice of cybercriminals.