Abstract
We present an empirical and large-scale analysis of malware samples captured from two different enterprises from 2017 to early 2018. Particularly, we perform threat vector, social-engineering, vulnerability and time-series analysis on our dataset. Unlike existing malware studies, our analysis is specifically focused on the recent enterprise malware samples. First of all, based on our analysis on the combined datasets of two enterprises, our results confirm the general consensus that AV-only solutions are not enough for real-time defenses in enterprise settings because on average 40% of the malware samples, when first appeared, are not detected by most AVs on VirusTotal or not uploaded to VT at all (i.e., never seen in the wild yet). Moreover, our analysis also shows that enterprise users transfer documents more than executables and other types of files. Therefore, attackers embed malicious codes into documents to download and install the actual malicious payload instead of sending malicious payload directly or using vulnerability exploits. Moreover, we also found that financial matters (e.g., purchase orders and invoices) are still the most common subject seen in Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams that aim to trick employees. Finally, based on our analysis on the timestamps of captured malware samples, we found that 93% of the malware samples were delivered on weekdays. Our further analysis also showed that while the malware samples that require user interaction such as macro-based malware samples have been captured during the working hours of the employees, the massive malware attacks are triggered during the off-times of the employees to be able to silently spread over the networks.
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Notes
- 1.
July 2018.
- 2.
We explain the details of the analysis module in Sect. 3.
- 3.
July 2018.
- 4.
For privacy reasons, we do not disclose the company names.
- 5.
July 2018.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and our shepherd Dr. Yajin Zhou for their comments and suggestions, which significantly improve the quality and presentation of this paper. This work was partially supported by US National Science Foundation under the grant numbers NSF CNS-1514142, NSF CNS-1703454, NSF-CNS-1718116, NSF-CAREER-CNS-1453647, and ONR (CyberPhys).
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Appendices
A A Sample Malicious Behaviours Report Generated by the DA Module
The list of malicious behaviours extracted via the DA module from a given sample:
B Massive Malware Attacks in Our Dataset
The following is the list of most frequently captured malware samples in our dataset (Table 5).
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Acar, A., Lu, L., Uluagac, A.S., Kirda, E. (2019). An Analysis of Malware Trends in Enterprise Networks. In: Lin, Z., Papamanthou, C., Polychronakis, M. (eds) Information Security. ISC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11723. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30215-3_18
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