REDUCTION OF FALSE POSITIVES IN MALWARE DETECTION USING FILE PROPERTY ANALYSIS

A virus detection engine determines that a file is suspected of being malware. A property is retrieved, along with the same file property of other executable files within the same folder. If the property value is similar to property values of the other files then the suspect file is benign. If the number of matches is greater than a threshold then the suspect file is benign. Other file properties of the suspect file are compared. If no file properties are similar to properties of the other files then the suspect file is malware and an alert is generated. The longest common subsequence compares property values. The same property value may be added to files within the same folder after these files are installed on the computer but before any detection takes place. A comparison of the same property values concludes that files are not malware, even if they are suspect.