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Detecting malware communities using socio-cultural cognitive mapping

Author

Listed:
  • Iain Cruickshank

    (Carnegie Mellon University)

  • Anthony Johnson

    (Johns Hopkins University)

  • Timothy Davison

    (Johns Hopkins University)

  • Matthew Elder

    (Johns Hopkins University)

  • Kathleen M. Carley

    (Carnegie Mellon University)

Abstract

We apply a variation of socio-cultural cognitive mapping (SCM) to computer malware features explored previously by Saxe and Berlin that characterized malware binaries as benign or malicious based on 1024 program features derived from a deep neural network-based detection system. In this work, we model the features as attributes within a latent spatial domain using a weighted consensus graph representation to visualize and analyze the malware binary communities. The data used in our analysis is extracted from a Remote Access Trojan family named Sakula that first appeared in 2012, and has been used to enable an adversary to run interactive commands and execute remote program functions. Our results show that by SCM we were able to identify distinct malware communities within the malware family, which revealed insights into the overall structure of the various binaries as well as possible temporal relationships between the binaries.

Suggested Citation

  • Iain Cruickshank & Anthony Johnson & Timothy Davison & Matthew Elder & Kathleen M. Carley, 2020. "Detecting malware communities using socio-cultural cognitive mapping," Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, Springer, vol. 26(3), pages 307-319, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:comaot:v:26:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1007_s10588-019-09300-w
    DOI: 10.1007/s10588-019-09300-w
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