NapierOne Mixed File Dataset

NapierOne is a modern cybersecurity mixed file data set, primarily aimed at, but not limited to, ransomware detection and forensic analysis. The dataset contains over 500,000 distinct files, representing 44 distinct popular file types. It was designed to address the known deficiency in research reproducibility and improve consistency by facilitating research replication and repeatability. The data set was inspired by the Govdocs1 data set and it is intended that ‘NapierOne’ be used as a complement to this original data set. An investigation was performed with the goal of determining the common files types currently in use. No specific research was found that explicitly provided this information, so an alternative consensus approach was employed. This involved combining the findings from multiple sources of file type usage into an overall ranked list. After which 5,000 real-world example files were gathered, and a specific data subset was created, for each of the common file types identified. In some circumstances, multiple data subsets were created for a specific file type, each subset representing a specific characteristic for that file type. For example, there are multiple data subsets for the ZIP file type with each subset containing examples of a specific compression method. Ransomware execution tends to produce files that have high entropy, so examples of file types that naturally have this attribute are also present. The resulting entire data set comprises of more than 90 separate data subsets divided between 44 distinct file types, resulting in over 500,000 unique files in total. Currently, the data set contains examples of the following file types APK, BIN, BMP, CSS, CSV, DOC, DOCX, DWG, ELF, EPS,EPUB, EXE, GIF, GZIP, HTML, ICS, JS, JPG, JSON, MKV, MP3, MP4, ODS, OXPS, PDF, PNG, PPT, PPTX, PS1, RAR, SVG, TAR, TIF, TXT, WEBP, XLS, XLSX, XML, ZIP, ZLIB, 7Zip