Micosoft Corporation

Steve Rehfuss

Christopher A Meek

Geoff Hulten

John Scarrow

Andrew J Newman

Ron Franczyk

The claimed subject matter is directed to the use of an application reputation service to assist users with minimizing their computerized machines' exposure to infection from malware. The claimed subject matter provides an application reputation service that contains the reputations for elements that are known to be non-malicious as well as those known to be malicious. One embodiment is implemented as a method to determine the reputation of an element (e.g., an application). When a user attempts to install or execute a new application, the Application Reputation Service is queried by the user's machine with a set of identities for the element. The reputation of the application is determined by referencing a knowledge base of known reputations and returns an indication (e.g., an overall rating, or a flag) of how safe that application would be to install and run on the user's computer.

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Bellevue, WA, United States of America

Steve Rehfuss