Patent ID: 8196203

Claim:
A method of determining software trustworthiness, comprising: receiving information associated with files of unknown trustworthiness stored on client computers; determining, using at least one computer processor, prevalence of at least one file of the files stored on the client computers in response to the information associated with files; generating a request to identify a software package having a plurality of the files stored on the client computer including the at least one file in response to the prevalence thereof exceeding a prevalence threshold, wherein the prevalence determines an order of the at least one file among the plurality of files; removing from the information associated with files, information associated with at least one file in response to the prevalence thereof falling below the prevalence threshold; installing on a clean machine the software package identified as including the at least one file of unknown trustworthiness; generating a report package including a catalog of files that have been installed or modified on the clean machine by the software package; determining identification attributes for each of the files in the catalog; processing each of the files in the catalog to assign a level of trustworthiness thereto; and providing the report package as output.