Related papers: Clustering Malware at Scale: A First Full-Benchmar…
Malware attacks have become significantly more frequent and sophisticated in recent years. Therefore, malware detection and classification are critical components of information security. Due to the large amount of malware samples…
Each day, anti-virus companies receive tens of thousands samples of potentially harmful executables. Many of the malicious samples are variations of previously encountered malware, created by their authors to evade pattern-based detection.…
A large amount of new malware is constantly being generated, which must not only be distinguished from benign samples, but also classified into malware families. For this purpose, investigating how existing malware families are developed…
In this paper, we use $K$-means clustering to analyze various relationships between malware samples. We consider a dataset comprising~20 malware families with~1000 samples per family. These families can be categorized into seven different…
With the adoption of multiple digital devices in everyday life, the cyber-attack surface has increased. Adversaries are continuously exploring new avenues to exploit them and deploy malware. On the other hand, detection approaches typically…
Finding meaningful clusters in drive-by-download malware data is a particularly difficult task. Malware data tends to contain overlapping clusters with wide variations of cardinality. This happens because there can be considerable…
Clustering algorithms have been increasingly adopted in security applications to spot dangerous or illicit activities. However, they have not been originally devised to deal with deliberate attack attempts that may aim to subvert the…
Clustering algorithms have become a popular tool in computer security to analyze the behavior of malware variants, identify novel malware families, and generate signatures for antivirus systems. However, the suitability of clustering…
Clustering algorithms are used in a large number of applications and play an important role in modern machine learning-- yet, adversarial attacks on clustering algorithms seem to be broadly overlooked unlike supervised learning. In this…
Data mining focuses on discovering interesting, non-trivial and meaningful information from large datasets. Data clustering is one of the unsupervised and descriptive data mining task which group data based on similarity features and…
Experimental evaluation is a major research methodology for investigating clustering algorithms and many other machine learning algorithms. For this purpose, a number of benchmark datasets have been widely used in the literature and their…
In data containing heterogeneous subpopulations, classification performance benefits from incorporating the knowledge of cluster structure in the classifier. Previous methods for such combined clustering and classification either 1) are…
In the current digital age, the volume of data generated by various cyber activities has become enormous and is constantly increasing. The data may contain valuable insights that can be harnessed to improve cyber security measures. However,…
Clustering has been well studied for desktop malware analysis as an effective triage method. Conventional similarity-based clustering techniques, however, cannot be immediately applied to Android malware analysis due to the excessive use of…
We examine methods for clustering in high dimensions. In the first part of the paper, we perform an experimental comparison between three batch clustering algorithms: the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, a winner take all version of…
This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of prominent clustering algorithms K-means, DBSCAN, and Spectral Clustering on high-dimensional datasets. We introduce a novel evaluation framework that assesses clustering…
Clustering is an unsupervised learning method that constitutes a cornerstone of an intelligent data analysis process. It is used for the exploration of inter-relationships among a collection of patterns, by organizing them into homogeneous…
Malware family labels are known to be inconsistent. They are also black-box since they do not represent the capabilities of malware. The current state-of-the-art in malware capability assessment include mostly manual approaches, which are…
The metamorphic malware variants with the same malicious behavior (family), can obfuscate themselves to look different from each other. This variation in structure leads to a huge signature database for traditional signature matching…
Today anti-malware community is facing challenges due to the ever-increasing sophistication and volume of malware attacks developed by adversaries. Traditional malware detection mechanisms are not able to cope-up with next-generation…