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Malicious software, often referred to as malware is a software that is “specifically designed to gain access to or damage a computer, usually without the knowledge of the owner.” There are various types of malware out there including spyware, viruses, worms and adware to name a few. It could be any software written with intent to harm or defect the data, device or the end user(Norton, 2018).

In a data and device heavy world today, it is inevitable to be 100% malware free environment and the impact of malware affecting people’s day to day life has gotten worse.Therefore, the end users should always expect the possibility and act to it with prevention and mitigation. In order to defeat the malware threat, it is important to first understand how to keep malware from infecting your device then find an appropriate malware detecting program that can effectively detect the potential threat in a timely manner (Tahir, 2018).

According to research, some techniques that malware programmers use to complicate their software and make it harder to be detected is called obfuscation. Examples include ‘Dead code insertion’, Instruction replacement’, ‘Register reassignment’, ‘Subroutine reordering’, ‘Code transposition’ and ‘Code integration’ (Tahir, 2018).

Accordingly, several techniques used to detect malware are:

1) Signature based – this tactic is very useful for any known malwares, however difficult to use for any unknown malwares. This approach finds interruptions utilizing a predefined list of known assaults (Souri, 2018).

2) Heuristic based – this tactic is good for both pre-existing and new malware, however consumes quite a lot of resources and time.

3) Specification based – this tactic is good for all malwares, however is not as efficient as it takes a lot of time to make low false positive.

4) Behavior based – this approach works by reviewing the selected behavior based approach. Suspicious object are assessed and are blocked from execution when it is detected (Souri, 2018)

in addition, several ways to analyze malware are static analysis, dynamic analysis Static analysis is fast and safe with good analyzation of multipath malwares. It is limited to malwares that are not obfuscated yet the accuracy rate is pretty high. Dynamic analysis is quite time consuming and vulnerable (Tahir, 2018).

As mentioned above, it is crucial to educate the end users that the malwares are prevalent and could occur on your device and data. If it is unavoidable, it is important to know what actions to be taken to best prevent or fix the virus when it occurs.

Reference

Malware 101: What is malware? (n.d.). Retrieved November 17, 2018, from https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-malware.htm…

Tahir, R. (2018). A Study on Malware and Malware Detection Techniques. Modern Education and Computer Science. Retrieved November 17, 2018, from http://www.mecs-press.org/ijeme/ijeme-v8-n2/IJEME-…

Souri, A., & Hosseini, R. (2018). A state‑of‑the‑art survey of malware detection approaches using data mining. Human-centric Computing and Information Science. Retrieved November 17, 2018, from https://hcis-journal.springeropen.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s13673-018-0125-x.