AI Boosts Malware Detection Rates by 70%

Threat intelligence-sharing platform VirusTotal has unveiled new research showing how AI can be used by cyber defenders to enhance malware analysis. Through the research, VirusTotal found that AI is extremely effective in analyzing malicious code, identifying 70% more malicious scripts than traditional techniques alone. Researchers also observed that AI was up to 300% more accurate than traditional techniques at detecting attempts by malicious scripts to target a device with a common vulnerability or exploit.

These findings are part of a report titled, *Empowering Defenders: How AI is shaping malware analysis, *in which Google-owned VirusTotal analyzed hundreds of thousands of samples of malware over a six-month period.

Speaking at the new flagship cybersecurity center in Europe, the Google Safety Engineering Centre (GSEC) in Málaga, Spain, Vincent Diaz, Threat Intelligence Analyst at VirusTotal, said that the team understood that large language models were great at creating code, so wanted to explore how the AI model could understand code. “Many of the [traditional tools] overlooked the thing that is not part of the incentive for detection because they are focused on endpoint protection. What happens with all the toolsets that the attackers are using though? They are still important to detect and flag the problem,” Diaz explained.

Infosecurity Magazine 11/29/2023