Literature Review in Visual Analytics for Malware Pattern Analysis

Abstract

Due to the increasing number of malware, monitoring of vulnerable systems is becoming increasingly more important. This applies to networks, individual computers, as well as mobile devices. For this purpose, there are various approaches and techniques to detect or to capture malicious software. To support the analysts, visualizing the data and using visual analytics (VA) methods during data exploration are beneficial approaches. There are a number of different visualization methods available which provide interaction for data exploration. We conducted a literature survey to provide an overview of the currently existing visualization and interaction techniques for malware analysis from the view of VA. All found papers were divided into 3 main categories to present common characteristics. This report shows that the scope of malware analysis in combination with VA is still not very well explored. Many of the described approaches use only few interaction techniques and leave a lot of room for future research activities.