Abstract
In the era of cyberspace, malware is the main weapon for launching cyber-attacks and the critical rival for the security community. More and more researchers are investing in the wave of anti-malware research. In order to promote researchers to enter the field of anti-malware research more smoothly, it is necessary to provide a comprehensive roadmap of the related theory and techniques, so that new researchers can quickly obtain the desiring knowledge. To this end, this article systematically reviews the knowledge of malware in accordance with the most effective research route, that is, “Why? → What? → How?”First, we analyze the significance of conducting malware research and explains “why?”; then, the concept, type, and harm of malware are summarized, and introduce “what?”; finally, the focus is on “how?”, i.e. malware detection and classification. In the presence of the increasing complexity of malware types and scales, this paper focuses on machine learning-based detection and classification methods in view of feature engineering and analysis environment. The abstract and contributions are summarized for each typical method so that researchers can quickly find the preferred references like a dictionary, and establish a comprehensive and clear framework for anti-malware research in a correct route.
Highlights
In the age of the Internet, malware has caused serious damage to the network
In order to facilitate researchers to find a research breakthrough that is suitable for their own research, we summarize the malware detection process based on machine learning, and systematically introduce the detection methods based on different feature engineering
To help initial researchers quickly and effectively establish a framework for malware awareness, this article conducts an extensive survey on this field based on papers published in SCI journals and important international academic conferences after 2010, according to an easy-to-understand roadmap
Summary
To protect legitimate users from malware, researchers have designed different anti-virus software to build a security barrier. A comprehensive reference guide may be the most appealing tool for them before stepping into the field of anti-malware research To this end, this paper takes the Windows platform malware as the object, systematically reviews the malware concept, type, harm, evolution. W. Han et al.: Review: Build a Roadmap for Stepping Into the Field of Anti-Malware Research Smoothly (5) Classify the literature of malware research from different angles, which is convenient for researchers to quickly find the entry point for malware research. (10) Spamware: Spamware is a type of malicious program that uses the system and network resources to deliver large amounts of spam This type of malware benefits by selling spam delivery services to attackers. They use the infected system as a transit station to use the Internet to send some command information or spam, and this information will be sent out hidden in normal network traffic, not detected
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