Generic Black-Box End-to-End Attack Against State of the Art API Call Based Malware Classifiers

In this paper, we present a black-box attack against API call based machine learning malware classifiers, focusing on generating adversarial sequences combining API calls and static features (e.g., printable strings) that will be misclassified by the classifier without affecting the malware functionality. We show that this attack is effective against many classifiers due to the transferability principle between RNN variants, feed forward DNNs, and traditional machine learning classifiers such as SVM. We also implement GADGET, a software framework to convert any malware binary to a binary undetected by malware classifiers, using the proposed attack, without access to the malware source code.Comment: Accepted as a conference paper at RAID 201

Artificial intelligence in the cyber domain: Offense and defense

Artificial intelligence techniques have grown rapidly in recent years, and their applications in practice can be seen in many fields, ranging from facial recognition to image analysis. In the cybersecurity domain, AI-based techniques can provide better cyber defense tools and help adversaries improve methods of attack. However, malicious actors are aware of the new prospects too and will probably attempt to use them for nefarious purposes. This survey paper aims at providing an overview of how artificial intelligence can be used in the context of cybersecurity in both offense and defense.Web of Science123art. no. 41

Prediction of dementia using machine learning model and performance improvement with cuckoo algorithm

Dementia is a brain disease that stays in the seventh position of death rate as per the report of the World Health Organization (WHO). Among the various types of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease has more than 70% of cases of dementia. The objective is to predict dementia disease from the open access series of imaging studies (OASIS) dataset using machine learning techniques. Also, the performance of the machine learning model is analyzed to improve the performance of the model using the cuckoo algorithm. In this paper, feature engineering has been focused and the prediction of dementia has been done using the OASIS dataset with the help of data mining techniques. Feature engineering is followed by prediction using the machine learning model Gaussian naïve Bayes (NB), support vector machine, and linear regression. Also, the best prediction model has been selected and done the validation. The evaluation metrics considered for validating the models are accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-Score and the highest values are 95%, 97%, 95%, and 95%. The Gaussian NB has been given these best results. The accuracy of the machine learning models has been increased by eliminating the factors which affect the performance of the models using the cuckoo algorithm

Malware classification using self organising feature maps and machine activity data

In this article we use machine activity metrics to automatically distinguish between malicious and trusted portable executable software samples. The motivation stems from the growth of cyber attacks using techniques that have been employed to surreptitiously deploy Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). APTs are becoming more sophisticated and able to obfuscate much of their identifiable features through encryption, custom code bases and in-memory execution. Our hypothesis is that we can produce a high degree of accuracy in distinguishing malicious from trusted samples using Machine Learning with features derived from the inescapable footprint left behind on a computer system during execution. This includes CPU, RAM, Swap use and network traffic at a count level of bytes and packets. These features are continuous and allow us to be more flexible with the classification of samples than discrete features such as API calls (which can also be obfuscated) that form the main feature of the extant literature. We use these continuous data and develop a novel classification method using Self Organizing Feature Maps to reduce over fitting during training through the ability to create unsupervised clusters of similar ‘behaviour’ that are subsequently used as features for classification, rather than using the raw data. We compare our method to a set of machine classification methods that have been applied in previous research and demonstrate an increase of between 7.24% and 25.68% in classification accuracy using our method and an unseen dataset over the range of other machine classification methods that have been applied in previous research

An empirical study on the various stock market prediction methods

Investment in the stock market is one of the much-admired investment actions. However, prediction of the stock market has remained a hard task because of the non-linearity exhibited. The non-linearity is due to multiple affecting factors such as global economy, political situations, sector performance, economic numbers, foreign institution investment, domestic institution investment, and so on. A proper set of such representative factors must be analyzed to make an efficient prediction model. Marginal improvement of prediction accuracy can be gainful for investors. This review provides a detailed analysis of research papers presenting stock market prediction techniques. These techniques are assessed in the time series analysis and sentiment analysis section. A detailed discussion on research gaps and issues is presented. The reviewed articles are analyzed based on the use of prediction techniques, optimization algorithms, feature selection methods, datasets, toolset, evaluation matrices, and input parameters. The techniques are further investigated to analyze relations of prediction methods with feature selection algorithm, datasets, feature selection methods, and input parameters. In addition, major problems raised in the present techniques are also discussed. This survey will provide researchers with deeper insight into various aspects of current stock market prediction methods