Determine whether unpatched systems are over-represented among infostealer victims

Determine whether systems lacking current security patches are disproportionately represented among victims of infostealer malware.

Background

The paper reports the operating-system distribution of 170,298 infostealer victims and finds that most victims use currently supported Windows or macOS releases, while approximately 1.37% use deprecated systems such as Windows 7 and Windows 8. However, the dataset records operating-system releases rather than patch levels, preventing the authors from assessing whether unpatched systems are more heavily targeted or more likely to be compromised. The authors therefore explicitly identify the relationship between missing patches and infostealer victimization as an unresolved question.