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.

Cyberattacks in the modern world are sophisticated and can be undetected in a dispersed setting. In a distributed setting, DoS and DDoS attacks cause resource unavailability. This has motivated the scientific community to suggest effective approaches in distributed contexts as a means of mitigating such attacks. Syn Flood is the most common sort of DDoS assault, up from 76% to 81% in Q2, according to Kaspersky’s Q3 report. Direct and indirect approaches are also available for launching DDoS attacks. While in a DDoS attack, controlled traffic is transmitted indirectly through zombies to reflectors to compromise the target host, in a direct attack, controlled traffic is sent directly to zombies in order to assault the victim host. Reflectors are uncompromised systems that only send replies in response to a request. To mitigate such assaults, traffic shaping and pushback methods are utilised. The SYN Flood Attack Detection and Mitigation Technique (SFaDMT) is an adaptive heuristic-based method we employ to identify DDoS SYN flood assaults. This study suggested an effective strategy to identify and resist the SYN assault. A decision support mechanism served as the foundation for the suggested (SFaDMT) approach. The suggested model was simulated, analysed, and compared to the most recent method using the OMNET simulator. The outcome demonstrates how the suggested fix improved detection.