An automated classification system based on the strings of trojan and virus families

Classifying malware correctly is an important research issue for anti-malware software producers. This paper presents an effective and efficient malware classification technique based on string information using several well-known classification algorithms. In our testing we extracted the printable strings from 1367 samples, including unpacked trojans and viruses and clean files. Information describing the printable strings contained in each sample was input to various classification algorithms, including tree-based classifiers, a nearest neighbour algorithm, statistical algorithms and AdaBoost. Using k-fold cross validation on the unpacked malware and clean files, we achieved a classification accuracy of 97%. Our results reveal that strings from library code (rather than malicious code itself) can be utilised to distinguish different malware families.