Tight Arms Race: Overview of Current Malware Threats and Trends in Their Detection

Details

Abstract

Cyber attacks are currently blooming, as the attackers reap significant profits from them and face a limited risk when compared to committing the “classical” crimes. One of the major components that leads to the successful compromising of the targeted system is malicious software. It allows using the victim’s machine for various nefarious purposes, e.g., making it a part of the botnet, mining cryptocurrencies, or holding hostage the data stored there. At present, the complexity, proliferation, and variety of malware pose a real challenge for the existing countermeasures and require their constant improvements. That is why, in this paper we first perform a detailed meta-review of the existing surveys related to malware and its detection techniques, showing an arms race between these two sides of a barricade. On this basis, we review the evolution of modern threats in the communication networks, with a particular focus on the techniques employing information hiding. Next, we present the bird’s eye view portraying the main development trends in detection methods with a special emphasis on the machine learning techniques. The survey is concluded with the description of potential future research directions in the field of malware detection.

Authors

• Luca Caviglione
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  National Research Council of Italy
  Genoa, Italy
• Michał Choraś
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  FernUniversität in Hagen | UTP University of Science and Technology
  Hagen, Germany | Bydgoszcz, Poland
• Igino Corona
  Pluribus One Srl
  Cagliari, Italy
• Artur Janicki
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  Warsaw University of Technology
  Warsaw, Poland
• Wojciech Mazurczyk
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  FernUniversität in Hagen | Warsaw University of Technology
  Hagen, Germany | Warsaw, Poland
• Marek Pawlicki
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  ITTI Sp. z o.o. | UTP University of Science and Technology
  Poznań, Poland | Bydgoszcz, Poland
• Katarzyna Wasielewska
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  Warsaw University of Technology | The State University of Applied Sciences in Elbląg
  Warsaw, Poland | Elbląg, Poland