Patent 10397261 was granted and assigned to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone on August, 2019 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An identifying device monitors malware to be analyzed and acquires, as log data, the malware, download data downloaded from a communication destination, and a relation of data transfer performed with the malware or the communication destination of the download data. Then, the identifying device creates, by using the acquired log data, a dependency relation graph that is a digraph in which the malware, download data, and communication destination are set as nodes and a dependency relation of each node is set as an edge. Then, the identifying device detects a malicious node by collating the respective nodes of the created dependency relation graph with the known maliciousness information, and traces an edge in a direction from a terminal point to a start point while setting the malicious node as a base point, and then identifies the traced node as a new malicious node.