A Deep Learning-based Malware Hunting Technique to Handle Imbalanced Data

Abstract

Nowadays, with the increasing use of computers and the Internet, more people are exposed to cyber-security dangers. According to antivirus companies, malware is one of the most common threats of using the Internet. Therefore, providing a practical solution is critical. Current methods use machine learning approaches to classify malware samples automatically. Despite the success of these approaches, the accuracy and efficiency of these techniques are still inadequate, especially for multiple class classification problems and imbalanced training data sets. To mitigate this problem, we use deep learning-based algorithms for classification and generation of new malware samples. Our model is based on the opcode sequences, which are given to the model without any pre-processing. Besides, we use a novel generative adversarial network to generate new opcode sequences for oversampling minority classes. Also, we propose the model that is a combination of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) to classify malware samples. CNN is used to consider short-term dependency between features; while, LSTM is used to consider longer-term dependence. The experiment results show our method could classify malware to their corresponding family effectively. Our model achieves 98.99% validation accuracy.