US Patent 9998484 Classifying potentially malicious and benign software modules through similarity analysis

A method comprises obtaining at least a first software module not classified as benign or potentially malicious, extracting a set of features associated with the first software module including static, behavior and context features, computing distance metrics between the extracted feature set and feature sets of a plurality of clusters including one or more clusters of software modules previously classified as benign and exhibiting a first threshold level of similarity relative to one another and one or more clusters of software modules previously classified as potentially malicious and exhibiting a second threshold level of similarity relative to one another, classifying the first software module as belonging to a given cluster based at least in part on the computed distance metrics, and modifying access by a given client device to the first software module responsive to the given cluster being a cluster of software modules previously classified as potentially malicious.