With this tool, AI could identify new malware as readily as it recognizes cats
This week, the cybersecurity firm Endgame released a large, open-source data set called EMBER (for “Endgame Malware Benchmark for Research”). EMBER is a collection of more than a million representations of benign and malicious Windows-portable executable files, a format where malware often hides. A team at the company also released AI software that can be trained on the data set. The idea is that if AI is to become a potent weapon in the fight against malware, it needs to know what to look for.
“It’s a game of whack-a-mole,”...
EMBER is meant to help automated cybersecurity programs keep up.
Instead of a collection of actual files, which could infect the computer of any researcher using them, EMBER contains a kind of avatar for each file, a digital representation that gives an algorithm an idea of the characteristics associated with benign or malicious files without exposing it to the genuine article.