How many anti-malware products does it take to change a country?

Reserve paper

Dennis Batchelder Microsoft
Fanny Lalonde Lévesque École Polytechnique de Montréal

We know that different countries have different malware infection rates for protected and unprotected customers. But do anti-malware vendors actually help to reduce malware infections? Can unprotected users benefit? Is there anything countries (or vendors) can do to affect these rates?

This is a study of the impact of the anti-malware ecosystem on a country's infection rates. Using big data collected from MSE, Windows Defender and MSRT from billions of machines since May, we identified and examined the impact of four factors on a country's infection rate:

• Percentage of population with up-to-date anti-malware software
• Anti-malware product diversity
• Microsoft anti-malware rates
• Up-to-date operating system rates

After identifying the risk factors, we correlated them with country-specific external data, such as broadband penetration, ISP diversity, and government corruption indexes. This led us to a small set of actions that anti-malware vendors (and countries) can take to better protect the world from malware.

This talk will present the research approach and analysis. It will identify malware infection risk factors, provide different 'recipes' for countries that wish to reduce their malware infection rates, and give advice to anti-malware vendors that wish to expand their global presence and better protect their customers.

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Dennis Batchelder Dennis Batchelder is the Director of Research at Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC). Since 2007, Dennis has been leading MMPC's efforts to help protect billions of computers from malware through real-time anti-malware products and services, strong industry partnerships, and continuous analysis of threat data using machine learning and the cloud. Dennis has worked for more than 25 years in the technology industry, holding various leadership roles in software development and management in the US and India. A native of New England, he currently lives in Seattle, Washington. Dennis has been a writer for more than a decade and is the author of the Soul Identity series of techno-thriller novels.

Fanny Lalonde Lévesque Fanny Lalonde Lévesque is a research associate in the Department of Computer & Software Engineering at the École Polytechnique de Montréal. She received her B.Eng. in software engineering (2010) and her M.Sc. in computer engineering (2013) from the École Polytechnique de Montréal. Her main research interest is security product testing methodologies.