Malware classification using deep learning methods

Abstract

Malware, short for Malicious Software, is growing continuously in numbers and sophistication as our digital world continuous to grow. It is a very serious problem and many efforts are devoted to malware detection in today’s cybersecurity world. Many machine learning algorithms are used for the automatic detection of malware in recent years. Most recently, deep learning is being used with better performance. Deep learning models are shown to work much better in the analysis of long sequences of system calls. In this paper a shallow deep learning-based feature extraction method (word2vec) is used for representing any given malware based on its opcodes. Gradient Boosting algorithm is used for the classification task. Then, k-fold cross-validation is used to validate the model performance without sacrificing a validation split. Evaluation results show up to 96% accuracy with limited sample data. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.