Malware development has seen diversity in terms of architecture and features. This advancement in the competencies of malware poses a severe threat and opens new research dimensions in malware detection. This study is focused on metamorphic malware, which is the most advanced member of the malware family. It is quite impossible for anti-virus applications using traditional signature-based methods to detect metamorphic malware, which makes it difficult to classify this type of malware accordingly. Recent research literature about malware detection and classification discusses this issue related to malware behavior. The main goal of this paper is to develop a classification method according to malware types by taking into consideration the behavior of malware. We started this research by developing a new dataset containing API calls made on the windows operating system, which represents the behavior of malicious software. The types of malicious malware included in the dataset are Adware, Backdoor, Downloader, Dropper, spyware, Trojan, Virus, and Worm. The classification method used in this study is LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory), which is a widely used classification method in sequential data. The results obtained by the classifier demonstrate accuracy up to 95% with 0.83 $F_1$-score, which is quite satisfactory. We also run our experiments with binary and multi-class malware datasets to show the classification performance of the LSTM model. Another significant contribution of this research paper is the development of a new dataset for Windows operating systems based on API calls. To the best of our knowledge, there is no such dataset available before our research. The availability of our dataset on GitHub facilitates the research community in the domain of malware detection to benefit and make a further contribution to this domain.

Due to advancements in malware competencies, cyber-attacks have been broadly observed in the digital world. Cyber-attacks can hit an organization hard by causing several damages such as data breach, financial loss, and reputation loss. Some of the most prominent examples of ransomware attacks in history are WannaCry and Petya, which impacted companies’ finances throughout the globe. Both WannaCry and Petya caused operational processes inoperable by targeting critical infrastructure. It is quite impossible for anti-virus applications using traditional signature-based methods to detect this type of malware because they have different characteristics on each contaminated computer. The most important feature of this type of malware is that they change their contents using their mutation engines to create another hash representation of the executable file as they propagate from one computer to another. To overcome this method that attackers use to camouflage malware, we have created three-channel image files of malicious software. Attackers make different variants of the same software because they modify the contents of the malware. In the solution to this problem, we created variants of the images by applying data augmentation methods. This article aims to provide an image augmentation enhanced deep convolutional neural network (CNN) models for detecting malware families in a metamorphic malware environment. The main contributions of the article consist of three components, including image generation from malware samples, image augmentation, and the last one is classifying the malware families by using a CNN model. In the first component, the collected malware samples are converted into binary file to 3-channel images using the windowing technique. The second component of the system create the augmented version of the images, and the last part builds a classification model. This study uses five different deep CNN model for malware family detection. The results obtained by the classifier demonstrate accuracy up to 98%, which is quite satisfactory.

The enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) represents a great challenge for online social networks (OSNs). Several OSNs are making significant changes to their systems to achieve compliance with GDPR. OSNs are required to obtain meaningful consent from users to achieve GDPR compliance. GDPR recognizes user's consent as a legitimate ground for personal data processing in the context of online social networks. This article presents a comparative study about the criteria for valid consent under GDPR and existing consent seeking practices of OSNs. In order to simplify the comparative process, Facebook is taken as a case study for online social networks. In conclusion of the comparative study, we argue that existing consent mechanisms in OSNs are not GDPR compliant. To achieve GDPR compliance in online social networks, we advocate a blockchain-based approach for consent management. This paper paves the way for designing a blockchain-based GDPR compliant consent management model for personal data processing in online social networks.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have become targets of attack by cyber criminals in resent times. This paper therefore aim to address awareness and challenges of SMEs related to IDSs as the most important defense tool against sophisticated and ever-growing network attacks. An IDSs framework was actually introduced for efficient network anomaly detection for SMEs and provided experimental results to illustrate the benefits of the proposed framework. The proposed framework deals with one of the main challenges that IDSs of SMEs are facing, the lack of scalability and autonomic self-adaptation. Training, testing and evaluation of IDSs applying different machine learning (ML) techniques are presented. Results of experiments show that using feature selection approaches can lead to better classification accuracy and improved computational speed.