Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Michael Jarrett

Vishal Kapoor

Adrian Mihail Marinescu

Marc E Seinfeld

Joseph Edwin Johnson, Jr

Charles Andrew Turner

Joseph Leo Faulhaber

Jeremy D Croy

Sterling M Reasor

Anil Francis Thomas

Jonathan Mark Keller

Alvin Loh

Jason J Joyce

Ajith Kumar

George Cristian Chicioreanu

Timothy David Ebringer

Marius Gheorghe Gheorghescu

Santanu Chakraborty

Ronald L Thompson

Joseph J Johnson

Mathew J McCormack

Kumi N Hilwa

Eddy S Hsia

Methods, systems, and computer program products are provided for recovering from false positives of malware detection. Malware signatures that are defective may be causing false positives during software scanning for malware. Such defective malware signatures may be detected (e.g., by user feedback, etc.) and revoked. Computers that are using the malware signatures to detect malware may be notified of the revoked signatures, and may be enabled to re-scan content identified as containing malware using malware signatures that do not include the revoked malware signatures. As such, if the content is determined during the re-scan to not be infected, the content may be re-enabled for usage on the computer (e.g., may be restored from quarantine storage).

Cloud malware false positive recovery

The subject disclosure relates to antimalware scanning, and more particularly to offline antimalware scanning of a host environment via an alternate, known safe operating system. An offline scanning product obtains data previously written by the host environment online antimalware scanning tool, e.g., configuration data and antimalware signatures in shared data stores accessible to the offline and online products, and uses that data to perform the offline antimalware scan. The offline scanning product writes results information and any quarantined files to other shared data stores, whereby the online environment, when rebooted, has access to the information, such as for review and to upload telemetry information to an online service for analysis. Also described is offline replacement of operating system files that cannot be cleaned or removed when online.

Offline scan, clean and telemetry using installed antimalware protection components

The subject disclosure is directed towards detecting malware or possible malware in an input file by allowing the input file to be opened, and by monitoring for one or more behaviors corresponding to the open file that likely indicate malware. Only certain executable files and/or file types opened thereby may be monitored, with various collected event data used for antimalware purposes when improper behavior is observed. Example behaviors include writing of a file to storage, generation of network traffic, injection of a process, running of script, and/or writing system registry data. Telemetry data and/or a sample of the file may be sent to an antimalware service, and malware remediation may be performed. Data (e.g., the collected events) may be distributed to other nodes for use in antimalware detection, e.g., to block execution of a similar file.

Discovering malicious input files and performing automatic and distributed remediation

An anti-malware system dynamically loads and unloads additional malware detection signatures based on a collection of data sources that indicate what signatures are relevant to a host machine in its current environment. A signature selector component determines what relevant signatures should be loaded. The signature selector component uses a variety of data sources either individually, or in combination, to determine relevancy of the available malware detection signatures. The anti-malware system dynamically determines which of the available malware detection signatures and classes of signatures are relevant and should be provided to a machine based on available information. The malware detection signatures are obtained and loaded automatically from one or more sources when a threat becomes relevant. A program or application may be blocked from accessing files until the relevant malware detection signatures have been loaded onto the machine.

Dynamic selection and loading of anti-malware signatures

Systems, methods and apparatus for automatically identifying a version of a file that is expected to be present on a computer system and for automatically replacing a potentially corrupted copy of the file with a clean (or undamaged) copy of the expected version. Upon identifying a file on the computer system as being potentially corrupted, a clean file agent may perform an analysis based on the identity of the file and one or more other properties of the system to determine the version of the file that is expected to be present on the system. Once the expected version is identified, a clean replacement copy of the file may be obtained from a clean file repository by submitting a version identifier of the expected version. The version identifier may be a hash value, which may additionally be used to verify integrity of the clean copy.

Clean store for operating system and software recovery

An arrangement for scanning and patching injected malware code that is executing in otherwise legitimate processes running on a computer system is provided in which malware code is located in the memory of processes by extracting the start addresses of processes' threads and then searching near these addresses. Additional blocks of code in memory that are invoked by the code identified by each start address are also identified and the blocks are then matched against scanning signatures associated with known malware threads. If the entire signature can be matched against a subset of the blocks, then the thread is determined to be infected. The infected thread is suspended and in-memory modifications are performed to patch the injected code to render it harmless. The thread can be resumed or terminated to disable the protection mechanisms of the malware without causing any harm to the process in which the thread is injected.

Thread scanning and patching to disable injected malware threats

Systems and methods that mitigate affects of malware and facilitate remediation processes. An analysis engine generates a list of actions for resources associated with the malware, and prioritizes/sorts the actions for execution. Such list of actions can be generated automatically via an action list generation component associated with the analysis engine. Likewise, a sorting component as part of the analysis engine can prioritize operations between detected malware to typically ensure a smooth operation during remediation processes (e.g., avoid conflicts).

Resource-reordered remediation of malware threats

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Kirkland, WA, United States of America

Michael Jarrett