Detecting malware communication on an infected computing device

Abstract

Rules describing attributes of malicious data requests, commonly generated by malware, are determined and stored. For example, a behavior server executes different types of malware and analyzes the data requests produced by the malware to identify attributes common to different malicious data requests. The rules describing malicious data request attributes are stored and subsequent data requests are compared to the stored rules to identify malicious data requests. If a data request has one or more attributes in common with attributes of malicious data requests, the data request is blocked. This allows attributes of a data request to be used to prevent malware executing on a client device from communicating with a malicious server.