Deception at Scale: How Malware Abuses Trust

The attackers actively use techniques to disguise malware files as legitimate, including reliable distribution channels, stolen certificates, hiding malicious files in legitimate applications, or using system tools to deploy malicious activity.

At VirusTotal, we have explored the evolution of these and other techniques. In fact, it was surprising to realize that more than one million signed files were sent in the past 12 months to our service, dozens of legitimate domains belonging to the Alexa Top 1k ranking were used …

applications attackers certificates deception deploy distribution fact files legitimate applications malicious malware scale stolen system techniques tools trust virustotal