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Cybercrime: The Case of Obfuscated Malware

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Abstract

Cybercrime has rapidly developed in recent years and malware is one of the major security threats in computer which have been in existence from the very early days. There is a lack of understanding of such malware threats and what mechanisms can be used in implementing security prevention as well as to detect the threat. The main contribution of this paper is a step towards addressing this by investigating the different techniques adopted by obfuscated malware as they are growingly widespread and increasingly sophisticated with zero-day exploits. In particular, by adopting certain effective detection methods our investigations show how cybercriminals make use of file system vulnerabilities to inject hidden malware into the system. The paper also describes the recent trends of Zeus botnets and the importance of anomaly detection to be employed in addressing the new Zeus generation of malware.

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© 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Alazab, M., Venkatraman, S., Watters, P., Alazab, M., Alazab, A. (2012). Cybercrime: The Case of Obfuscated Malware. In: Georgiadis, C.K., Jahankhani, H., Pimenidis, E., Bashroush, R., Al-Nemrat, A. (eds) Global Security, Safety and Sustainability & e-Democracy. e-Democracy ICGS3 2011 2011. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 99. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33448-1_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33448-1_28

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33447-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33448-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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