Windows api malware. Malware dataset for security researchers, data scientists.

Windows api malware For example, a typical downloader API is URLDownloadToFile. Public malware dataset generated by Cuckoo Sandbox based on Windows OS API calls analysis for cyber security researchers - ocatak/malware_api_class The Windows PE Malware API dataset is a comprehensive collection of data that focuses on Windows Portable Executable (PE) files and their associated Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Let’s get to it! Mar 27, 2024 · In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity threats, attackers continually seek out vulnerabilities within system architectures, often leveraging native Windows Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to conduct malicious activities. The words „malicious‟ and „software‟ are merged to create the term Malware. Each file was executed in an isolated environment powered by the Cuckoo sandbox. It suggests effective strategies to mitigate Gorgon Group malware can leverage the Windows API call, CreateProcessA(), for execution. Malware is a very big threat in day-to-day computing world. Sep 1, 2023 · This paper presents API-MalDetect, a new deep learning-based automated framework for detecting malware attacks in Windows systems. S0531 : Grandoreiro : Grandoreiro can execute through the WinExec API. , 2013). Windows API Hashing is a common technique used by malware to obfuscate the API calls they make to the operating system. The API call sequence is extracted from a portable executable file. The framework uses an NLP-based encoder for API calls and a hybrid automatic feature extractor based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and bidirectional gated recurrent units (BiGRU) to extract features from raw and long sequences of API calls. by observing total 534 API calls related to each category. When we analyze the import table from a malware sample, We understand that all the API in the import table would be called at least once from the code segment. Dec 27, 2022 · What is Windows API Hashing#. Although the API calls are a bit hard to work with, they can still help Mar 1, 2025 · Malware often uses fixed names for mutexes, which can be good host-based indicators to detect additional installations of the malware. Malware detection, Windows API calls, Machine learning. Jun 2, 2024 · The Win32 API (Windows Application Programming Interface) is a collection of functions, constants, and data types that Windows operating systems provide for applications to interact with the… Jul 13, 2017 · The Windows API is a large, complex topic with decades of development history and design behind it. In , detection of a malware variant in the Windows Operating System (OS) is elaborated. MalBehvaD-V1 is a new dynamic dataset of API call sequences extracted from benign and malware executables files (EXE files) in Windows using the dynamic malware analysis approach. The purpose of this lab is to get a bit more familiar with API Hashing - a technique employed by malware developers, that makes malware analysis a bit more difficult by hiding suspicious imported Windows APIs from the Import Address Table of the Portable Executable. May 1, 2020 · Windows Application Programming Interface (API) call sequences are considered one of the most representative characteristics in behavior-based malware detection (Elhadi et al. The API call analysis reveals how malware behaves. CreateProcess ( Top ) This function creates and launches a new process. S0632 : GrimAgent : GrimAgent can use Native API including GetProcAddress and ShellExecuteW. Since malware often Jul 11, 2024 · Since Windows APIs are critical for malware to effect any change on the victim’s system, the pattern of API calls made by a malware sample can provide valuable insights into its Malware dataset for security researchers, data scientists. Apr 29, 2020 · Windows API, in short, the WinAPI, is a set of functions and procedures, which can abstract much of the tasks you perform everyday on the Windows OS. May 1, 2024 · The Windows API calls are widely used in dynamic malware detection [8], [9], [10]. During launch, the malware selects the appropriate table based on the hashed API name, applies the correct XOR mask to decode the value, and dynamically resolves the corresponding Windows API function. Apr 29, 2020 · Malware writers make use of these API calls to interact with the OS and perform nefarious tasks. These API calls are indexed from 0 to 341. Even though the malware executables were easily downloadable, Nov 28, 2020 · Malware analyst requires understanding each API call that affects the operating system to have the details of malware’s behavior being analyzed. Malware category-wise relevant API feature selection using Document class-wise frequency and classification. This is the first study to undertake metamorphic malware to build sequential API calls. Apr 3, 2020 · This behavior is all Windows API call requests that the malware has made on the Windows 7 operating system. S0499 May 17, 2022 · This study seeks to obtain data which will help to address machine learning based malware research gaps. Instead, attackers manually find function addresses — this leads us to API hashing. Although this method of API obfuscation is relatively old, my friend who was wanting to increase his skills in the Windows sphere confronted me about a way a few malware families seem to resolve APIs. It's pretty simple, however he could not find any documentation with a solid programming example on . S0561 : GuLoader : GuLoader can use a number of different APIs for discovery and execution. The API GetWindowDC is typical for the screen-grabbers we sometimes see in spyware and keyloggers. This technique is often used by malware developers to hide their calls to the windows API. INTRODUCTION Malware which is also termed as malicious software enters system without the permission of user of the system [1]. This layer of concealment forces analysts to delve deeper to uncover the Oct 30, 2017 · We can determine whether a file may be malicious by its API calls, some of which are typical for certain types for malware. Nov 1, 2022 · (2) Constructing an API call graph which contains API name as well as argument features, and design a graph learning model to analyze the content and structural information of the API call graph. Nov 15, 2023 · Malware developers take advantage of this situation and use sophisticated coding/ obfuscation techniques to add, remove, and replace redundant API calls in malware and evade existing detection mechanisms. A Windows program usually calls many system APIs during runtime, which characterizes all program behaviors including file operation, network access, registry modification, etc. Although it is far too vast to cover in a single article, even a cursory knowledge is enough to improve your event analysis and your basic malware analysis skills. Let’s look at an example to clarify how this might be helpful. With this article, I’ll help you analyze a particular malware sample, along with the identification of a few API calls, and see if we can further identify the behavior of that particular malware sample. We build the dataset by downloading the variety of malware executables from VX Heavens source [14]. This paper proposes a methodology for dynamic malware analysis and classification using a malware Portable Executable (PE) file from the MalwareBazaar repository. Some of the data pre-processing activities are: Indexing Windows API calls: When we examined the Windows API calls in the dataset, we found that there were 342 different API calls. Sep 6, 2023 · By employing API hashing, malware creators can ensure that specific Windows APIs remain hidden from casual observation. WinAPI provides access to base services like filesystem, processes, and threads; and to higher level services such as UI control, and networking (for example NetBIOS and RPC) the API calls. The Application Programming Interface (API) calls exposes these functions to programmers to make use of procedures when writing one of your own isn’t the most effective. 1. This technique makes static analysis and detection by security solutions such as EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) and antivirus (AV) more difficult. To address these concerns, we propose a novel and lightweight API call sequence-based Windows malware detection system, MalAnalyser. Mar 1, 2018 · However, since the proposed system barely depends on the frequency of the API calls, the system is unable to detect samples that invoke excessive and redundant API calls. Mar 17, 2025 · Precomputed API checksums are stored in multiple lookup tables, each masked with an XOR value. Previous Windows API Hashing in Malware Next Calling Syscalls Directly from Visual Studio to Bypass AVs/EDRs Last updated 1 year ago It's possible to enumerate which Windows API calls are hooked by an EDR using inline patching technique, where a jmp instruction is inserted at the beginning of the syscall stub to be hooked. The specific objective of this study is to build a benchmark dataset for Windows operating system API calls of various malware. Jan 25, 2024 · The rise of malware attacks presents a significant cyber-security challenge, with advanced techniques and offline command-and-control (C2) servers causing disruptions and financial losses. Jan 25, 2025 · Malware avoids calling GetProcAddress() directly because security tools monitor it. That way the blue team will have more difficulty reversing the malware and it is less flagged by an AV. The main contribution in this paper is developing a technique for malware classification and further extracting signatures for all these five classes based on API A reference of Windows API function calls, including functions for file operations, process management, memory management, thread management, dynamic-link library (DLL) management, synchronization, Oct 29, 2020 · In Windows, the core set of functions that the OS makes accessible to software components is handled through the Windows API, also known as WinAPI. In this paper, we propose DMalNet, a dynamic malware analysis framework that consists of API feature engineering and API call graph learning. It is hoped that this research will contribute to a deeper understanding of Nov 18, 2016 · We took the main classes of windows malware and observed their behaviors related to files, registry, network, services etc. xpzka cavg jyjev iawily vgsekdm esqaf dpqtbl xjdas buuz eqrx msqfnvj epjei cvm zsvuq ckvdq