DeepOrigin: End-to-End Deep Learning for Detection of New Malware Families
This provides a focalizing tool for cybersecurity researchers to adapt to the fast-moving threat landscape, though it is incremental as it builds on existing transfer learning and feature representation techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting new malware families by developing an end-to-end deep learning method that uses transfer learning and invariant file representations to differentiate known from unseen malware, achieving 97.7% accuracy on a dataset of thousands of variants.
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.