Dealing with Malware

Malware encompasses a vast array of applications that are designed to disrupt, damage, gain illegal access to, spy on, and do all sorts of other unwanted things to networks, applications, data, and users. Trying to cover every potential kind of malware in all of its various forms in a single chapter, or even a single book, is impossible. Even limiting the topic to just the detection and mitigation of malware using ML techniques is impossible. So, this chapter is more of an overview of malware with some specific examples and references you can use to find additional details. No, you won’t learn how to build your very own piece of malware for experimentation and the chapter will try to limit the potential damage to your system from any example code. A focus of this chapter is the use of safe techniques for learning the skills you need to tackle malware. With this in mind, the actual sample executable is benign, but the techniques shown are effective with any...