Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Malware Target Recognition Via Static Heuristics, Thomas E. Dube, Richard A. Raines, Gilbert L. Peterson, Kenneth W. Bauer, Michael R. Grimaila, Steven K. Rogers

Faculty Publications

Organizations increasingly rely on the confidentiality, integrity and availability of their information and communications technologies to conduct effective business operations while maintaining their competitive edge. Exploitation of these networks via the introduction of undetected malware ultimately degrades their competitive edge, while taking advantage of limited network visibility and the high cost of analyzing massive numbers of programs. This article introduces the novel Malware Target Recognition (MaTR) system which combines the decision tree machine learning algorithm with static heuristic features for malware detection. By focusing on contextually important static heuristic features, this research demonstrates superior detection results. Experimental results on large …