Decision-Making Method for Estimating Malware Risk Index

• Main Author: Dohoon Kim
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-11-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: malware; risk analysis; apt; risk index; second-order markov process; mri; ci
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/9/22/4943

Most recent cyberattacks have employed new and diverse malware. Various static and dynamic analysis methods are being introduced to detect and defend against these attacks. The malware that is detected by these methods includes advanced present threat (APT) attacks, which allow additional intervention by attackers. Such malware presents a variety of threats (DNS, C&C, Malicious IP, etc.) This threat information used to defend against variants of malicious attacks. However, the intelligence that is detected in this manner is used in the blocking policies of information-security systems. Consequently, it is difficult for staff who perform Computer Emergence Response Team security control to determine the extent to which cyberattacks such as malware are a potential threat. Additionally, it is difficult to use this intelligence to establish long-term defense strategies for specific APT attacks or implement intelligent internal security systems. Therefore, a decision-making model that identifies threat sources and malicious activities (MAs) that occur during the static and dynamic analysis of various types of collected malware and performs machine learning based on a quantitative analysis of these threat sources and activities is proposed herein. This model estimates malware risk indices (MRIs) in detail using an analytic hierarchy process to analyze malware and the probabilities of MAs. The analysis results were significant, as the consistency index of the estimated MRI values for 51300 types of malware, which were collected during a specific control period, was maintained at <0.051.