Researchers eye machines to tackle malware

Automation eliminates human error

The reverse engineer – better known amongst security researchers by his nom de plume, Halvar Flake – created an automated system for classifying software into groups, a process for which he believes machines are much better suited.

Research using the system has underscored the sometimes-arbitrary decisions humans make in classifying malicious programs, he said. Among other anomalies, he found that Sasser.D has only a 69 per cent correlation to previous members of the Sasser family, while two examples of bot software, Gobot and Ghostbot, are more similar.

“It’s like putting donkeys and bunnies in the same class because they both have long ears,” Dullien, the founder and CEO of reverse-engineering tool maker Sabre Security, said in a recent interview.

The current problems with classifying and naming viruses are among the reasons that automated classification technology has once again become a focus of research. The plethora of names for specific malicious programs has caused confusion amongst consumers, despite a project that seeks to provide guidance, if not to consumers, to software analysts and incident responders.

Full story: The Register