Mastering Machine Learning for Penetration Testing

Malware detection with CNNs

For this new model, we are going to discover how to build a malware classifier with CNNs. But I bet you are wondering how we can do that while CNNs are taking images as inputs. The answer is really simple, the trick here is converting malware into an image. Is this possible? Yes, it is. Malware visualization is one of many research topics during the past few years. One of the proposed solutions has came from a research study called Malware Images: Visualization and Automatic Classification by Lakshmanan Nataraj from the Vision Research Lab, University of California, Santa Barbara.

The following diagram details how to convert malware into an image:

The following is an image of the Alueron.gen!J malware:

This technique ...