Malware: the never-ending arm race

Menéndez, Héctor D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6314-3725 (2021) Malware: the never-ending arm race. Open Journal of Cybersecurity, 1 (1) . pp. 1-25. [Article] (doi:10.46723/ojc.1.1.3)

Preview

PDF - Published version (with publisher's formatting) Available under License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0. Download (286kB) | Preview

Abstract

"Antivirus is death"' and probably every detection system that focuses on a single strategy for indicators of compromise. This famous quote that Brian Dye --Symantec's senior vice president-- stated in 2014 is the best representation of the current situation with malware detection and mitigation. Concealment strategies evolved significantly during the last years, not just like the classical ones based on polimorphic and metamorphic methodologies, which killed the signature-based detection that antiviruses use, but also the capabilities to fileless malware, i.e. malware only resident in volatile memory that makes every disk analysis senseless. This review provides a historical background of different concealment strategies introduced to protect malicious --and not necessarily malicious-- software from different detection or analysis techniques. It will cover binary, static and dynamic analysis, and also new strategies based on machine learning from both perspectives, the attackers and the defenders.

Actions (login required)

View Item

Statistics

DownloadsShow export options

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Activity Overview

6 month trend

201Downloads

6 month trend

327Hits

Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.