Analysis of Computer Infection Risk Factors Based on Customer Network Usage

Epidemiology, the science that studies the cause and propagation of diseases, provides us with the concepts and methods to analyze the potential risk factors to which ADSL customers´ PCs are exposed, with respect to their usage of network applications. This paper details the analysis of the traffic of a large set of real ADSL customers in the corenet work. We build a profile of network usage for each customer and we detect malicious ones. Based on these data we study the impact of some characteristics in ADSL customer profiles on their likeliness to generate malicious traffic. We find two application types that are risk factors and we also bring evidence that the type of operating system impacts greatly the odds of being infected. Based on these results we build a profile of customers more likely to be infected.