Where can I, as an individual, find clean programs to analyze?

Question

This question includes a good list of sources where an individual might collect malware samples for analysis.

I'd like to get a large number of public, non-malicious programs for the purpose of comparing various attributes to malware samples.

I have explored the following options:

• Scraping executables from arbitrary websites with a bot. Such a bot would be rather difficult to write, not to mention being unethical, and requiring strategies to deal with anti-bot measures such as CloudFlare.

• Using C:\Windows as a source. I spent some time looking at some Windows files. They were abundant, but all seem to perform extremely specialized functions and I have doubts about how well they would represent legitimate programs in the real world

• Finding and downloading programs manually. This would be extremely slow and tedious, and also ineffective to get large numbers of such programs.

I suppose what would be ideal for my situation is a sort of program dump, but I'm not aware of any that exist.

As someone unaffiliated with any organisation, is there an effective way of getting a large number of public normal programs for the purpose of comparing their features to a set of malicious programs?

Answer 1

For Windows, I would suggest shareware aggregators, for example

• http://download.cnet.com/windows/
• http://www.tucows.com/windows
• http://padsites.org/

and/or archive sites:

• http://cd.textfiles.com/
• http://www.oldversion.com/