The evolution of malware is continuing at an alarming rate, despite the efforts made towards detecting and mitigating them. Malware analysis is needed to defend against its sophisticated behaviour. However, the manual heuristic inspection is no longer effective or efficient. To cope with these critical issues, behaviour-based malware detection approaches with machine learning techniques have been widely adopted as a solution. It involves supervised classifiers to appraise their predictive performance on gaining the most relevant features from the original features' set and the trade-off between high detection rate and low computation overhead. Though machine learning-based malware detection techniques have exhibited success in detecting malware, their shallow learning architecture is still deficient in identifying sophisticated malware. Therefore, in this paper, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based Windows malware detector has been proposed that uses the execution time behavioural features of the Portable Executable (PE) files to detect and classify obscure malware. The 10-fold cross-validation tests were conducted to assess the proficiency of the proposed approach. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach was effective in uncovering malware PE files by utilizing significant behavioural features suggested by the Relief Feature Selection Technique. It attained detection accuracy of 97.968%.

Malicious software or malware has grown rapidly and many anti-malware defensive solutions have failed to detect the unknown malware since most of them rely on signature-based technique. This technique can detect a malware based on a pre-defined signature, which achieves poor performance when attempting to classify unseen malware with the capability to evade detection using various code obfuscation techniques. This growing evasion capability of new and unknown malwares needs to be countered by analyzing the malware dynamically in a sandbox environment, since the sandbox provides an isolated environment for analyzing the behavior of the malware. In this paper, the malware is executed on to the cuckoo sandbox to obtain its run-time behavior. At the end of the execution, the cuckoo sandbox reports the system calls invoked by the malware during execution. However, this report is in JSON format and has to be converted to MIST format to extract the system calls. The collected system calls are structured in the form of N-Grams, which help to build the classifier by using the Information Gain (IG) as a feature selection technique. A comprehensive experiment was conducted to perceive the best fit classifier among the chosen classifiers, including the Bayesian-Logistic-Regression, SPegasos, IB1, Bagging, Part, and J48 defined within the WEKA tool. From the experimental results, the overall best performance for all the selected top N-Grams such as 200, 400, and 600 goes to SPegasos with the highest accuracy, highest True Positive Rate (TPR), and lowest False Positive Rate (FPR).

Automation seems widespread today, yet it is not implemented in daily life. However, most home automation systems are expensive, object-dependent, and lacking in crucial features. The Internet of Things was enabled by this paper’s low-cost home automation system. For development of the IoT, the system used Node-RED, an open-source platform that uses nodes to visualize tasks. This innovation could operate home devices, including plugs, from anywhere. Wireless sensor network (WSN) technology would record and upload data to the web server from each room. Using the publish-and-subscribe Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol, these WSN technologies would communicate. The third feature can modify notifications. In situations of doubt, the house member would be notified by email. This proposal promotes home automation through the IoT.