The dark side of Potential Unwanted Applications

The prevalence of potentially unwanted applications (PUA) is much greater than of any type of malware. Every day at Kaspersky, we receive hundreds of thousands of notifications about users facing PUAs. PUAs are generally considered somewhat less sophisticated than other threats to IT security, so they’re not as well covered in the cybersecurity industry. While many antivirus vendors simply classify them as “unwanted” programs, PUAs are often the source of infection for serious threats. Our “PUA Botfarm” system, which downloads the current offers of several partner programs, helped us discover that almost half of Pay Per Install (PPI) partner program offers, which is a widespread way of distributing PUAs, also contain malware, such as cryptominers, password-stealers and banking Trojans. In this webinar, Anton Ivanov and Dmitry Latokhin, security experts on the Kaspersky Anti-Malware Research team, will share the results of our in-depth research of the most dangerous types of potentially unwanted applications. In this webcast you will learn: - How malware operators use PUAs to infect users - How PUA operators try to hide their illegal activities, e.g. most frequent ways to distribute PUAs - The principles of Kaspersky’s PUA Botfarm system, which uses PUAs to discover new threats and automatically detect them - Basic rules to prevent infection with PUAs