  System-wide propagation is frequently observed in malware, and there are
several resources, like blog posts and similar, that detail some of the
techniques used. However, there is currently no thorough study on the subject
at large, and the full extent of system-wide malware propagation remains
unknown. In this paper, we perform a systematic study on many real-world
samples to comprehensively characterise system-wide propagation within the
malware landscape and the goal is to use detailed and precise analyses to
derive high-level views. We achieve this by collecting a diverse set of malware
samples, analyse them in our Minerva malware analysis framework and then
extract vast amounts of statistics about the results. We use these results to
provide an in-depth discussion centred on four main research questions.
