Automatically generating malware definitions using word-level analysis

Abstract

Methods and systems are provided for automatically generating malware definitions and using generated malware definitions. One example method generally includes receiving information associated with a malicious application and extracting malware strings from the malicious application. The method further includes filtering the malware strings using a set of safe strings to produce filtered strings and scoring the filtered strings to produce string scores by evaluating words of the filtered strings based on word statistics of a set of known malicious words. The method further includes selecting a set of candidate strings from the filtered strings based on the string scores and generating a malware definition for the malicious application based on the set of candidate strings. The method also includes performing one or more security actions to protect against the malicious application, using the malware definition.