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Disguised malware script detection system using hybrid genetic algorithm

Published: 18 March 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Malicious software, or malware for short, is one of the most serious threats to computer systems. There are various disguise techniques that hide malware from being detected, and these techniques are becoming more sophisticated. Traditional signature-based detection systems often can not cope with disguised malware timely. In this paper, we propose a new approach to detect disguised malware scripts. The proposed system consists of a metric-based detection algorithm and a hybrid genetic algorithm. We use the frequencies of token occurrences as a metric, and separate identifiers from other program tokens. The genetic algorithm tries further detection by extracting the main core of a program. Experimental tests showed that the proposed system successfully detected a number of newly generated malware scripts which existing anti-viruses missed more than half of. The system would be suitable for an offline malware detection which requires high quality.

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Cited By

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  • (2018)Enhanced Approach to Detect Malicious VBScript Files Based on Data Mining TechniquesProcedia Computer Science10.1016/j.procs.2018.10.127141(552-558)Online publication date: 2018
  • (2017)Malicious VBScript detection algorithm based on data-mining techniques2017 Intl Conf on Advanced Control Circuits Systems (ACCS) Systems & 2017 Intl Conf on New Paradigms in Electronics & Information Technology (PEIT)10.1109/ACCS-PEIT.2017.8303028(112-116)Online publication date: Nov-2017
  • (2015)Metamorphic malware categorization using co-evolutionary algorithm2015 7th Conference on Information and Knowledge Technology (IKT)10.1109/IKT.2015.7288668(1-6)Online publication date: May-2015

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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '13: Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
March 2013
2124 pages
ISBN:9781450316569
DOI:10.1145/2480362
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 18 March 2013

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Author Tags

  1. hybrid genetic algorithm
  2. malware detection
  3. malware disguise techniques
  4. metric-based method

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  • Research-article

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SAC '13
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SAC '13: SAC '13
March 18 - 22, 2013
Coimbra, Portugal

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SAC '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 255 of 1,063 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
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Cited By

View all
  • (2018)Enhanced Approach to Detect Malicious VBScript Files Based on Data Mining TechniquesProcedia Computer Science10.1016/j.procs.2018.10.127141(552-558)Online publication date: 2018
  • (2017)Malicious VBScript detection algorithm based on data-mining techniques2017 Intl Conf on Advanced Control Circuits Systems (ACCS) Systems & 2017 Intl Conf on New Paradigms in Electronics & Information Technology (PEIT)10.1109/ACCS-PEIT.2017.8303028(112-116)Online publication date: Nov-2017
  • (2015)Metamorphic malware categorization using co-evolutionary algorithm2015 7th Conference on Information and Knowledge Technology (IKT)10.1109/IKT.2015.7288668(1-6)Online publication date: May-2015

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