The evolution of recent malicious software with the rising use of digital services has increased the probability of corrupting data, stealing information, or other cybercrimes by malware attacks. Therefore, malicious software must be detected before it impacts a large number of computers. Recently, many malware detection solutions have been proposed by researchers. However, many challenges limit these solutions to effectively detecting several types of malware, especially zero-day attacks due to obfuscation and evasion techniques, as well as the diversity of malicious behavior caused by the rapid rate of new malware and malware variants being produced every day. Several review papers have explored the issues and challenges of malware detection from various viewpoints. However, there is a lack of a deep review article that associates each analysis and detection approach with the data type. Such an association is imperative for the research community as it helps to determine the suitable mitigation approach. In addition, the current survey articles stopped at a generic detection approach taxonomy. Moreover, some review papers presented the feature extraction methods as static, dynamic, and hybrid based on the utilized analysis approach and neglected the feature representation methods taxonomy, which is considered essential in developing the malware detection model. This survey bridges the gap by providing a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of malware detection model research. This survey introduces a feature representation taxonomy in addition to the deeper taxonomy of malware analysis and detection approaches and links each approach with the most commonly used data types. The feature extraction method is introduced according to the techniques used instead of the analysis approach. The survey ends with a discussion of the challenges and future research directions.

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept has emerged to improve people’s lives by providing a wide range of smart and connected devices and applications in several domains, such as green IoT-based agriculture, smart farming, smart homes, smart transportation, smart health, smart grid, smart cities, and smart environment. However, IoT devices are at risk of cyber attacks. The use of deep learning techniques has been adequately adopted by researchers as a solution in securing the IoT environment. Deep learning has also successfully been implemented in various fields, proving its superiority in tackling intrusion detection attacks. Due to the limitation of signature-based detection for unknown attacks, the anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) gains advantages to detect zero-day attacks. In this paper, a systematic literature review (SLR) is presented to analyze the existing published literature regarding anomaly-based intrusion detection, using deep learning techniques in securing IoT environments. Data from the published studies were retrieved from five databases (IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, Science Direct, and MDPI). Out of 2116 identified records, 26 relevant studies were selected to answer the research questions. This review has explored seven deep learning techniques practiced in IoT security, and the results showed their effectiveness in dealing with security challenges in the IoT ecosystem. It is also found that supervised deep learning techniques offer better performance, compared to unsupervised and semi-supervised learning. This analysis provides an insight into how the use of data types and learning methods will affect the performance of deep learning techniques for further contribution to enhancing a novel model for anomaly intrusion detection and prediction.

Ransomware is an ill-famed malware that has received recognition because of its lethal and irrevocable effects on its victims. The irreparable loss caused due to ransomware requires the timely detection of these attacks. Several studies including surveys and reviews are conducted on the evolution, taxonomy, trends, threats, and countermeasures of ransomware. Some of these studies were specifically dedicated to IoT and android platforms. However, there is not a single study in the available literature that addresses the significance of dynamic analysis for the ransomware detection studies for all the targeted platforms. This study also provides the information about the datasets collection from its sources, which were utilized in the ransomware detection studies of the diverse platforms. This study is also distinct in terms of providing a survey about the ransomware detection studies utilizing machine learning, deep learning, and blend of both techniques while capitalizing on the advantages of dynamic analysis for the ransomware detection. The presented work considers the ransomware detection studies conducted from 2019 to 2021. This study provides an ample list of future directions which will pave the way for future research.

Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are caused by neurodegeneration and poor communication between neurons in the brain. So far, no effective medications have been discovered for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Thus, early diagnosis is necessary to avoid the development of these diseases. In this study, efficient machine learning algorithms were assessed to evaluate the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) dataset for dementia diagnosis. Two CNN models (AlexNet and ResNet-50) and hybrid techniques between deep learning and machine learning (AlexNet+SVM and ResNet-50+SVM) were also evaluated for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. For the OASIS dataset, we balanced the dataset, replaced the missing values, and applied the t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbour Embedding algorithm (t-SNE) to represent the high-dimensional data in the low-dimensional space. All of the machine learning algorithms, namely, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree, Random Forest and K Nearest Neighbours (KNN), achieved high performance for diagnosing dementia. The random forest algorithm achieved an overall accuracy of 94% and precision, recall and F1 scores of 93%, 98% and 96%, respectively. The second dataset, the MRI image dataset, was evaluated by AlexNet and ResNet-50 models and AlexNet+SVM and ResNet-50+SVM hybrid techniques. All models achieved high performance, but the performance of the hybrid methods between deep learning and machine learning was better than that of the deep learning models. The AlexNet+SVM hybrid model achieved accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and AUC scores of 94.8%, 93%, 97.75% and 99.70%, respectively.

Web applications have become ubiquitous for many business sectors due to their platform independence and low operation cost. Billions of users are visiting these applications to accomplish their daily tasks. However, many of these applications are either vulnerable to web defacement attacks or created and managed by hackers such as fraudulent and phishing websites. Detecting malicious websites is essential to prevent the spreading of malware and protect end-users from being victims. However, most existing solutions rely on extracting features from the website’s content which can be harmful to the detection machines themselves and subject to obfuscations. Detecting malicious Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) is safer and more efficient than content analysis. However, the detection of malicious URLs is still not well addressed due to insufficient features and inaccurate classification. This study aims at improving the detection accuracy of malicious URL detection by designing and developing a cyber threat intelligence-based malicious URL detection model using two-stage ensemble learning. The cyber threat intelligence-based features are extracted from web searches to improve detection accuracy. Cybersecurity analysts and users reports around the globe can provide important information regarding malicious websites. Therefore, cyber threat intelligence-based (CTI) features extracted from Google searches and Whois websites are used to improve detection performance. The study also proposed a two-stage ensemble learning model that combines the random forest (RF) algorithm for preclassification with multilayer perceptron (MLP) for final decision making. The trained MLP classifier has replaced the majority voting scheme of the three trained random forest classifiers for decision making. The probabilistic output of the weak classifiers of the random forest was aggregated and used as input for the MLP classifier for adequate classification. Results show that the extracted CTI-based features with the two-stage classification outperform other studies’ detection models. The proposed CTI-based detection model achieved a 7.8% accuracy improvement and 6.7% reduction in false-positive rates compared with the traditional URL-based model.

Software defined networking (SDN) is an emerging network paradigm that decouples the control plane from the data plane. The data plane is composed of forwarding elements called switches and the control plane is composed of controllers. SDN is gaining popularity from industry and academics due to its advantages such as centralized, flexible, and programmable network management. The increasing number of traffics due to the proliferation of the Internet of Thing (IoT) devices may result in two problems: (1) increased processing load of the controller, and (2) insufficient space in the switches’ flow table to accommodate the flow entries. These problems may cause undesired network behavior and unstable network performance, especially in large-scale networks. Many solutions have been proposed to improve the management of the flow table, reducing controller processing load, and mitigating security threats and vulnerabilities on the controllers and switches. This paper provides comprehensive surveys of existing schemes to ensure SDN meets the quality of service (QoS) demands of various applications and cloud services. Finally, potential future research directions are identified and discussed such as management of flow table using machine learning.