Richard Rivera
Platon Kotzias
Avinash Sudhodanan
Juan Caballero
2018-06-06
<p>Freeware is proprietary software that can be used free of charge. A popular vector for distributing freeware are download<br>
portals, i.e., websites that index, categorize, and host programs. Download portals can be abused to distribute potentially unwanted<br>
programs (PUP) and malware. The abuse can be due to PUP and malware authors uploading their ware, by benign freeware<br>
authors joining as affiliate publishers of PPI services and other affiliate programs, or by malicious download portal owners. In this<br>
work, we perform a systematic study of abuse in download portals. We build a platform to crawl download portals and apply it to<br>
download 191K Windows freeware installers from 20 download portals. We analyze the collected installers and execute them in a<br>
sandbox to monitor their installation. We measure an overall ratio of PUP and malware between 8% (conservative estimate) and<br>
26% (lax estimate). In 18 of the 20 download portals examined the amount of PUP and malware is below 9%. But, we also find<br>
two download portals exclusively used to distribute PPI downloaders. Finally, we detail different abusive behaviors that authors of<br>
undesirable programs use to distribute their programs through download portals.</p>
https://doi.org/10.1049/iet-ifs.2017.0585
oai:zenodo.org:1295566
eng
Zenodo
https://zenodo.org/communities/elastest
https://zenodo.org/communities/eu
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
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Costly Freeware: A Systematic Analysis of Abuse in Download Portals
info:eu-repo/semantics/article