Portable executable scoring: What is your malicious score?

Abstract

Malicious program or malware is a computer program which was written intentionally to harm computing system. Malware protection involves several sub-tasks namely Monitoring, Prevention, Analysis, Detection, Removal and Recovery. This paper proposes a static heuristic based scoring system that gives a maliciousness score to portable executable files. Malicious score can be used at different stage of malware protection system and the proposed system is very light weight. Different statistical pilot tests are performed to find out different parameter for static heuristic and a sound statistical experiment framework is also developed to evaluate the proposed work. The experimental results show the promising outcomes by achieving 85% accuracy which is acceptable in different malware sub-process.