Conclusions
In this paper we conducted a complex manual investigation of 200 suspected malware in a live operational infrastructure. We exploited four commonly used security data sources and a number of derived features to validate suspected infections. Based on our experiment, we analyze the complementary utility of the different data sources and the characteristics of the IDS signatures that were associated with confirmed incidents. Notably, we observe that a search engine, which is a less wellestablished security data source, was much more useful in the diagnosis of security incidents than other more traditional security sources, namely, blacklists, active scanners, and vulnerability analysis tools.