Malware Visualization Techniques

Abstract

Malware basically means malicious software that can be an intrusive program code or anything that is designed to perform malicious operations on system and executes malicious actions such as clandestine, listening, monitoring, saving, and deleting without the user's knowledge and consent. Malware review and analysis requires an advanced level of programming knowledge, in-depth file systems knowledge, deep code inspection, and reverse engineering capability. New techniques are needed to reduce indirect costs of malware analysis. This paper aims to provide insights into the malware visualization techniques and its applications, most common malware types and the extracted features that used to identify the malware are demonstrated in this study. In this work, Systematic Literature Review (SLR) conducted to investigate the current state of knowledge about Malware detection techniques, data visualization and malware features. An advanced research has been carried out in most relevant digital libraries for potential published articles. 90 preliminary studies (PS) were determined on the basis of inclusion and exclusion criteria. The analytical study is based mainly on the PSs to achieve the goals. The results clarify the importance of visualization techniques and which are the most common malware as well as the most useful features. Several ways to visualize malware to help malware analysts have been suggested.