Guillaume Sicard

Ilay Cordonsky, Ishai Rosenberg, Guillaume Sicard et al.

In this paper, we present a novel method of differentiating known from previously unseen malware families. We utilize transfer learning by learning compact file representations that are used for a new classification task between previously seen malware families and novel ones. The learned file representations are composed of static and dynamic features of malware and are invariant to small modifications that do not change their malicious functionality. Using an extensive dataset that consists of thousands of variants of malicious files, we were able to achieve 97.7% accuracy when classifying between seen and unseen malware families. Our method provides an important focalizing tool for cybersecurity researchers and greatly improves the overall ability to adapt to the fast-moving pace of the current threat landscape.

Ishai Rosenberg, Guillaume Sicard, Eli David

In recent years numerous advanced malware, aka advanced persistent threats (APT) are allegedly developed by nation-states. The task of attributing an APT to a specific nation-state is extremely challenging for several reasons. Each nation-state has usually more than a single cyber unit that develops such advanced malware, rendering traditional authorship attribution algorithms useless. Furthermore, those APTs use state-of-the-art evasion techniques, making feature extraction challenging. Finally, the dataset of such available APTs is extremely small. In this paper we describe how deep neural networks (DNN) could be successfully employed for nation-state APT attribution. We use sandbox reports (recording the behavior of the APT when run dynamically) as raw input for the neural network, allowing the DNN to learn high level feature abstractions of the APTs itself. Using a test set of 1,000 Chinese and Russian developed APTs, we achieved an accuracy rate of 94.6%.