A framework for generating malware threat intelligence

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing devices with network capabilities have become the critical cyber infrastructure for academia, industry and government in day-to-day life. The cyber-attacks being launched on this critical infrastructure have shifted to the pursuit of financial profit and political gains which lead to cyber warfare on various scales. The evolution of new practices like social networking, explosion of mobile devices and cloud computing have given opportunities to attackers for discovering vulnerabilities and exploiting these for creating sophisticated attacks. Malware is one of the most dreadful security threats fronting the Internet today. It is evolving and making use of new ways to target computers and mobile devices. Moreover, the exponential escalation in their volume and complexity has increased the damage caused by them. These have the capability to circumvent the earlier developed methods of detection and mitigation which clearly shows the need of shifting from traditional cyber security to cyber security intelligence. This paper purposes a design of a framework for generating Malware Threat Intelligence that can analyze, identify and predict the malware threats and can act as an Early Warning System (EWS). It also presents the real-time testing of the proposed framework which is realized by designing a prototype for providing security-as-a-service.