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The proliferation of malware in today’s society continues to impact industry, government, and academic organizations. The Dark Web provides cyber criminals with a venue to exchange and store malicious code and malware. Hence, this research develops a crawler to harvest source code, scripts, and executable files that are freely available on the Dark Web to investigate the proliferation of malware. Harvested executable files are analyzed with publicly accessible malware analysis tool services, including VirusTotal, Hybrid Analysis, and MetaDefender Cloud. The crawler crawls over 15 million web pages and collects over 20 thousand files consisting of code, scripts, and executable files. Analysis of the data examines the distribution of files collected from the Dark Web, the differences in the results between the analysis services, and the malicious classification of files. The results reveal that about 30% of the harvested executable files are considered malicious by the malware analysis tools. 

The recent pandemic fosters an increasing dependency on various forms of digital communications that support social distancing. To mitigate widespread exposure to COVID, the Louisiana Department of Health’s COVID Defense contact tracing application helps users learn about potential exposures to infected individuals. This research investigates the viability of using the Louisiana Department of Health’s COVID Defense application symptoms share feature as an attack vector. The primary contribution of this research is an initial assessment of the effective modification and distribution of a packaged JSON file that contains a malicious link. Secondly, it highlights the effectiveness of this attack through email, WIFI direct, and nearby share.