A survey on heuristic malware detection techniques

Abstract

Malware is a malicious code which is developed to harm a computer or network. The number of malwares is growing so fast and this amount of growth makes the computer security researchers invent new methods to protect computers and networks. There are three main methods used to malware detection: Signature based, Behavioral based and Heuristic ones. Signature based malware detection is the most common method used by commercial antiviruses but it can be used in the cases which are completely known and documented. Behavioral malware detection was introduced to cover deficiencies of signature based method. However, because of some shortcomings, the heuristic methods have been introduced. In this paper, we discuss the state of the art heuristic malware detection methods and briefly overview various features used in these methods such as API Calls, OpCodes, N-Grams etc. and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.