Exploiting altruism in social networks for friend-to-friend malware detection

We propose a novel malware detection application - SocialScan - which enables friend-to-friend (f2f) malware scanning services among social peers, with scanning resource sharing governed by levels of social altruism. We show that with f2f sharing of resources, SocialScan achieves a 65% increase in the detection rate of 0- to 1-day-old malware among social peers as compared to the the detection rates of individual scanners. We also show that SocialScan provides greatly enhanced malware protection to social hubs.