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A Deep Dive into the VirusTotal File Feed

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Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA 2023)

Abstract

Online scanners analyze user-submitted files with a large number of security tools and provide access to the analysis results. As the most popular online scanner, VirusTotal (VT) is often used for determining if samples are malicious, labeling samples with their family, hunting for new threats, and collecting malware samples. We analyze 328M VT reports for 235M samples collected for one year through the VT file feed. We use the reports to characterize the VT file feed in depth and compare it with the telemetry of an AV vendor. We answer questions such as How diverse is the feed? How fresh are the samples it provides? What fraction of samples can be labeled on first sight? How different are the malware families in the feed and the AV telemetry?

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Acknowledgment

This work has been partially supported by the PRODIGY Project (TED2021-132464B-I00) funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and EU NextGeneration funds.

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Correspondence to Kevin van Liebergen .

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van Liebergen, K., Caballero, J., Kotzias, P., Gates, C. (2023). A Deep Dive into the VirusTotal File Feed. In: Gruss, D., Maggi, F., Fischer, M., Carminati, M. (eds) Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment. DIMVA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13959. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35504-2_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35504-2_8

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