ScaleNet: Scalable and Hybrid Framework for Cyber Threat Situational Awareness Based on DNS, URL, and Email Data Analysis

Abstract

A computer virus or malware is a computer program, but with the purpose of causing harm to the system. This year has witnessed the rise of malware and the loss caused by them is high. Cyber criminals have continually advancing their methods of attack. The existing methodologies to detect the existence of such malicious programs and to prevent them from executing are static, dynamic and hybrid analysis. These approaches are adopted by anti-malware products. The conventional methods of were only efficient till a certain extent. They are incompetent in labeling the malware because of the time taken to reverse engineer the malware to generate a signature. When the signature becomes available, there is a high chance that a significant amount of damage might have occurred. However, there is a chance of detecting the malicious activities quickly by analyzing the events of DNS logs, Emails, and URLs. As these unstructured raw data contains rich source of information, we explore how the large volume of data can be leveraged to create cyber intelligent situational awareness to mitigate advanced cyber threats.