Pinpointing malicious activities through network and system-level malware execution behavior

Abstract

Malicious programs pose a major threat to Internet-connected systems, increasing the importance of studying their behavior in order to fight against them. In this paper, we propose definitions to the different types of behavior that a program can present during its execution. Based on those definitions, we define suspicious behavior as the group of actions that change the state of a target system. We also propose a set of network and system-level dangerous activities that can be used to denote the malignity in suspicious behaviors, which were extracted from a large set of malware samples. In addition, we evaluate the malware samples according to their suspicious behavior. Moreover, we developed filters to translate from lower-level execution traces to the observed dangerous activities and evaluated them in the context of actual malware. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.