A Survey of Malware Analysis Using Community Detection Algorithms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, we have witnessed an overwhelming and fast proliferation of different types of malware targeting organizations and individuals, which considerably increased the time required to detect malware. The malware developers make this issue worse by spreading many variants of the same malware [ 13 ]. To deal with this issue, graph theory techniques, and particularly community detection algorithms, can be leveraged to achieve bulk detection of malware families and variants to identify malicious communities instead of focusing on the detection of an individual instance of malware, which could significantly reduce the detection time. In this article, we review the state-of-the-art malware analysis solutions that employ community detection algorithms and provide a taxonomy that classifies the solutions with respect to five facets: analysis task, community detection approach, target platform, analysis type, and source of features. We present the solutions with respect to the analysis task, which covers malware detection, malware classification, cyber-threat infrastructure detection, and feature selection. The findings of this survey indicate that there is still room for contributions to further improve the state of the art and address research gaps. Finally, we discuss the advantages and the limitations of the solutions, identify open issues, and provide future research directions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".