One of the major and serious threats on the Internet today is malicious software, often referred to as a malware. The malwares being designed by attackers are polymorphic and metamorphic which have the ability to change their code as they propagate. Moreover, the diversity and volume of their variants severely undermine the effectiveness of traditional defenses which typically use signature based techniques and are unable to detect the previously unknown malicious executables. The variants of malware families share typical behavioral patterns reflecting their origin and purpose. The behavioral patterns obtained either statically or dynamically can be exploited to detect and classify unknown malwares into their known families using machine learning techniques. This survey paper provides an overview of techniques for analyzing and classifying the malwares.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.