Malware is software intentionally designed to cause damage to, or perform unauthorized actions on, a computer system or network. Malware is commonly classified according to its characteristics, mode of operation, and purpose; each such category is generally termed a malware family. Knowledge bases like the Malpedia document individual malware families, some examples include Emotet and WannaCry.
There is also a museum dedicated to preserving malware: the Museum of Malware Art (often abbreviated as MUMA) in Helsinki, Finland. Curated by cybersecurity expert Mikko Hyppönen and located at the headquarters of cybersecurity firm WithSecure in the Jätkäsaari neighborhood, it showcases physical artworks, such as sculptures, paintings and soundscapes, inspired by decades of famous computer viruses and cyber threats.
Note: It evolved from an earlier, virtual collection known as "The Malware Museum" hosted via the Internet Archive.
The notebook Malware Classifier covers the training of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) from scratch and the fine-tuning of pretrained models via transfer learning to classify malware images. Working exclusively with images that represent malicious binaries avoids direct handling of the binaries themselves, thereby reducing the risk of accidental system infection.
The notebook implements a malware classifier based on the technique explored in the paper Classifying Malware Images with Convolutional Neural Network Models (Bensaoud, Abudawaood and Kalita), which explores malware classification based on malware images.
The analysis uses a dataset of malware images, published with the paper Malware Images: Visualization and Automatic Classification (Nataraj, Karthikeyan, Jacob and Manjunath).
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This work is based on Malware Classification by
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Inspiration — Classifying Malware Images with Convolutional Neural Network Models (Bensaoud, Abudawaood and Kalita).
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Dataset — Malware Images: Visualization and Automatic Classification (Nataraj, Karthikeyan, Jacob and Manjunath).