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."

Business karma

[jbmartin6]

It is interesting to see how karma works in the business world. Microsoft has been doing this for quite some time, with a few differences in implementation. But when Microsoft does it, we see that they are spying on us [slashdot.org]. When Google plays catch up, it grabs headlines for fighting malware.