The Pros And Cons Of Malware

INTRODUCTION

The Internet has become an important part of the daily life of many people. More and more people are making use of services that are present on the Internet. The Internet has evolved from a basic communication network to an interconnected set of information sources enabling, among other things, new forms of interactions and market places for the sale of services and products. Online banking or advertising are common examples of the commercial aspects of the Internet. Consider as in the physical world, there are people on the Internet with harmful intentions that struggle to enrich themselves by taking benefits of legal users whenever money is involved. Malware (i.e., malicious software) helps these people fulfilling their intents.

“Malware” is a term that can be used for any software that gets installed and activated on our device and performs unwanted actions and tasks. It often does so for the benefit of the third party. Malware programs can range from being simple annoying programs like adwares (pop up advertisements) to cause serious damage or invasion on one’s system[9]. The damage can be unmentionable as it can cause various threats like stealing passwords and data or infecting other machines that network with the infected device.

Majority of the malware programs are developed with an intention of data theft. They are designed to transmit information about the user for any third party interest. They generally keep a track of the user’s browsing habits for benefit of any third

Day to day the number of malwares are increasing and approximately every day thousands of new malwares are introduced to the internet via various resources. Thus it becomes a need for the sake of one’s safety that a system to detect and curd these malwares has to be developed.

MALWARE DETECTION TECHNIQUES

Techniques used for malware detection can be broadly classified into two categories: anomaly-based detection and signature-based detection. A special type of anomaly based detection is specification-based detection. Fig. 2. Types of Malware Detection Techniques

Signature Based Malware Detection Technique

Signature based detection uses the knowledge of what is considered as malicious to finds out the maliciousness of the program under inspection.[3] Commercial antivirus scanners look for signatures which are typically a sequence of bytes within the malware code to declare that the program scanned is malicious in nature. Basically there are three kinds of malwares: basic, polymorphic, metamorphic malwares. In basic malware the program entry point is changed such that the control is transferred to malicious payload. Detection is relatively if the signature can be found for the viral code.

Fig. 3. Basic