Abstract
Exfiltration of sensitive data by malicious software or malware is a serious cyber threat around the world that has catastrophic effect on businesses, research organizations, national intelligence, as well as individuals. Thousands of cyber criminals attempt every day to attack computer systems by employing malicious software with an intention to breach crucial data, damage or manipulate data, or to make illegal financial transfers. Protection of this data is therefore, a critical concern in the research community. This manuscript aims to propose a comprehensive framework to classify and detect malicious software to protect sensitive data against malicious threats using data mining and machine learning classification techniques. In this work, we employ a robust and efficient approach for malware classification and detection by analyzing both signature-based and anomaly-based features. Experimental results confirm the superiority of the proposed approach over other similar methods.