Malware Detection

Although the use of data mining for security and malware detection is quickly on the rise, most books on the subject provide high-level theoretical discussions to the near exclusion of the practical aspects. Breaking the mold, Data Mining Tools for Malware Detection provides a step-by-step breakdown of how to develop data mining tools for malware d

This book captures the state of the art research in the area of malicious code detection, prevention and mitigation. It contains cutting-edge behavior-based techniques to analyze and detect obfuscated malware. The book analyzes current trends in malware activity online, including botnets and malicious code for profit, and it proposes effective models for detection and prevention of attacks using. Furthermore, the book introduces novel techniques for creating services that protect their own integrity and safety, plus the data they manage.

Discover how the internals of malware work and how you can analyze and detect it. You will learn not only how to analyze and reverse malware, but also how to classify and categorize it, giving you insight into the intent of the malware. Malware Analysis and Detection Engineering is a one-stop guide to malware analysis that simplifies the topic by teaching you undocumented tricks used by analysts in the industry. You will be able to extend your expertise to analyze and reverse the challenges that malicious software throws at you. The book starts with an introduction to malware analysis and reverse engineering to provide insight on the different types of malware and also the terminology used in the anti-malware industry. You will know how to set up an isolated lab environment to safely execute and analyze malware. You will learn about malware packing, code injection, and process hollowing plus how to analyze, reverse, classify, and categorize malware using static and dynamic tools. You will be able to automate your malware analysis process by exploring detection tools to modify and trace malware programs, including sandboxes, IDS/IPS, anti-virus, and Windows binary instrumentation. The book provides comprehensive content in combination with hands-on exercises to help you dig into the details of malware dissection, giving you the confidence to tackle malware that enters your environment. What You Will Learn Analyze, dissect, reverse engineer, and classify malware Effectively handle malware with custom packers and compilers Unpack complex malware to locate vital malware components and decipher their intent Use various static and dynamic malware analysis tools Leverage the internals of various detection engineering tools to improve your workflow Write Snort rules and learn to use them with Suricata IDS Who This Book Is For Security professionals, malware analysts, SOC analysts, incident responders, detection engineers, reverse engineers, and network security engineers "This book is a beast! If you're looking to master the ever-widening field of malware analysis, look no further. This is the definitive guide for you." Pedram Amini, CTO Inquest; Founder OpenRCE.org and ZeroDayInitiative

In the present work the behavior of malicious software is studied, the security challenges are understood, and an attempt is made to detect the malware behavior automatically using dynamic approach. Various classification techniques are studied. Malwares are then grouped according to these techniques and malware with unknown characteristics are clustered into an unknown group. The classifiers used in this research are k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN), J48 Decision Tree, and n-grams.

The popularity of Android mobile phones has caused more cybercriminals to create malware applications that carry out various malicious activities. The attacks, which escalated after the COVID-19 pandemic, proved there is great importance in protecting Android mobile devices from malware attacks. Intelligent Mobile Malware Detection will teach users how to develop intelligent Android malware detection mechanisms by using various graph and stochastic models. The book begins with an introduction to the Android operating system accompanied by the limitations of the state-of-the-art static malware detection mechanisms as well as a detailed presentation of a hybrid malware detection mechanism. The text then presents four different system call-based dynamic Android malware detection mechanisms using graph centrality measures, graph signal processing and graph convolutional networks. Further, the text shows how most of the Android malware can be detected by checking the presence of a unique subsequence of system calls in its system call sequence. All the malware detection mechanisms presented in the book are based on the authors' recent research. The experiments are conducted with the latest Android malware samples, and the malware samples are collected from public repositories. The source codes are also provided for easy implementation of the mechanisms. This book will be highly useful to Android malware researchers, developers, students and cyber security professionals to explore and build defense mechanisms against the ever-evolving Android malware.

The authors develop a malware fingerprinting framework to cover accurate android malware detection and family attribution in this book. The authors emphasize the following: (1) the scalability over a large malware corpus; (2) the resiliency to common obfuscation techniques; (3) the portability over different platforms and architectures. First, the authors propose an approximate fingerprinting technique for android packaging that captures the underlying static structure of the android applications in the context of bulk and offline detection at the app-market level. This book proposes a malware clustering framework to perform malware clustering by building and partitioning the similarity network of malicious applications on top of this fingerprinting technique. Second, the authors propose an approximate fingerprinting technique that leverages dynamic analysis and natural language processing techniques to generate Android malware behavior reports. Based on this fingerprinting technique, the authors propose a portable malware detection framework employing machine learning classification. Third, the authors design an automatic framework to produce intelligence about the underlying malicious cyber-infrastructures of Android malware. The authors then leverage graph analysis techniques to generate relevant intelligence to identify the threat effects of malicious Internet activity associated with android malware. The authors elaborate on an effective android malware detection system, in the online detection context at the mobile device level. It is suitable for deployment on mobile devices, using machine learning classification on method call sequences. Also, it is resilient to common code obfuscation techniques and adaptive to operating systems and malware change overtime, using natural language processing and deep learning techniques. Researchers working in mobile and network security, machine learning and pattern recognition will find this book useful as a reference. Advanced-level students studying computer science within these topic areas will purchase this book as well.

The smartphone has rapidly become an extremely prevalent computing platform, with just over 115 million devices sold in the third quarter of 2011, a 15% increase over the 100 million devices sold in the first quarter of 2011, and a 111% increase over the 54 million devices sold in the first quarter of 2010. Android in particular has seen even more impressive growth, with the devices sold in the third quarter of 2011 (60.5 million) almost triple the devices sold in the third quarter of 2010 (20.5 million), and an associated doubling of market share. This popularity has not gone unnoticed by malware authors. Despite the rapid growth of the Android platform, there are already well-documented cases of Android malware, such as DroidDream, which was discovered in over 50 applications on the official Android market in March 2011. Furthermore, it is found that Android’s built-in security features are largely insufficient, and that even non malicious programs can (unintentionally) expose confidential information. A study of 204,040 Android applications conducted in 2011 found 211 malicious applications on the official Android market and alternative marketplaces. The problem of using a machine learning-based classifier to detect malware presents the challenge: Given an application, we must extract some sort of feature representation of the application. To address this problem, we extract a heterogeneous feature set, and process each feature independently using multiple kernels.We train a One-Class Support Vector Machine using the feature set we get to classify the application as a benign or malware accordingly.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment, DIMVA 2021, held virtually in July 2021. The 18 full papers and 1 short paper presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. DIMVA serves as a premier forum for advancing the state of the art in intrusion detection, malware detection, and vulnerability assessment. Each year, DIMVA brings together international experts from academia, industry, and government to present and discuss novel research in these areas. Chapter “SPECULARIZER: Detecting Speculative Execution Attacks via Performance Tracing” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.