Bank Creates Its Own AI To Identify & Disintegrate Malware

JPMorgan Chase is integrating Artificial Intelligence into its internal security systems to thwart malware infections within its own networks.
 
Machine-learning code predicts whether connections are legit or likely to result in a bad day for someone. The majority of cyber-crime has always been financially motivated, and banking Trojans or botnets have been some of the primary drivers of botnet traffic and malicious activities. 
 
For example, The GameOver ZeuS (GOZ) group, was a crime ring that focused on corporate banking account takeovers, with an estimated 100 million dollars of losses attributed to the group. 
 
The steps below describe in greater detail how APT-based banking Trojan typically works: 
 
1. Reconnaissance and Weaponisation: Gathering information and preparation of an attack. Using Carbanak APT [22] as an example, Cyber-criminals registered new spoofing domains to impersonate a legitimate software or tech company in later spear phishing emails claiming required software update. 
2. Delivery: Common methods of malicious payload delivery by banking Trojans are email attachments, social engineering and drive by download through spear phishing campaigns targeting employees within the victim organisations. 
3. Exploitation and Installation: If an employee within the targeted organizations opened the attachments or visited the malicious websites in above spear phishing emails, the vulnerability is successfully exploited, and backdoor is installed on the victim’s system. 
4. Command and Control: Command-and-control (C2) infrastructure plays an essential role in coordinating botnets and malware. Attackers set up C2 servers to distribute commands or harvest sensitive data from victims’ computers, or gain access to the critical systems in the victim’s infrastructure. Many sophisticated malware families contain domain generation algorithms (DGAs) to generate pseudo-random domains in bulk to evade public blacklists. 
5. Action on Objectives: Once the attackers successfully compromised the victim’s networks, especially the critical systems such as money processing services or financial accounts, attackers can now perform fraudulent transactions or cash out. 
 
JPMorgan Chase is integrating AI into its internal security systems to thwart malware infections within its own networks.
The banls Technology and IT experts the describe how deep learning can be used to identify malicious activity, such as spyware on staff PCs attempting to connect to hackers' servers on the public internet. It can also finger URLs in received emails as suspicious. And it’s not just an academic exercise: some of these AI-based programs are already in production use within the financial giant.
 
The aim is to detect and neutralize malware that an employee may have accidentally installed on their workstation after, say, opening a booby-trapped attachment in a spear-phishing email. It can also block web-browser links that would lead the employee to a page that would attempt to install malware on their computer.
 
Neural networks can be trained to act as classifiers, and predict whether connections to the outside world are legit or fake: bogus connections may well be, for example, attempts by snoop-ware on an infected PC to reach the outside world, or a link to a drive-by-download site. These decisions are thus based on the URL or domain name used to open the connection. 
Specifically, long-short term memory networks (LSTM) used in the bank's AI software can predict if a particular URL or domain name is real or fake. The engineers trained theirs using a mixture of private and public datasets.
 
The public datasets included a list of real domains scraped from the top million websites as listed by Alexa; they also used 30 different Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA), typically used by malware, to spin up a million fake malicious domains. For the URL data, they took 300,000 benign URLs from the DMOZ Open Directory Project dataset and 267,418 phishing URLS from the Phishtank dataset. The researchers didn’t specify the proportion of data used for training, validation, and testing.
 
You might think just firewalling off and logging all network traffic from bank workers' PCs to the outside world would do the trick in catching naughty connections and thus has turned to machine-learning to improve its network monitoring while allowing ongoing connections.
 
How it Works
First, the string of characters in a particular URL or domain name to be checked are converted into vectors and fed into the LSTM as input. The model then spits out a number or probability that the URL or domain name is bogus.
 
The LSTM was able to a performance of 0.9956 (with one being the optimal result) when classifying phishing URLs and 91 per cent accuracy for DGA domains, with a 0.7 per cent false positive rate. AI is well adapted to discovering the common patterns and techniques used in malicious software, and can even be more effective than traditional URL and domain-name filters.
 
“Advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, such as Deep learning, Graph analysis, play a more significant role in reducing the time and cost of manual feature engineering and discovering unknown patterns for Cyber security analysts,” the bank's researchers told The Register.
 
Next, they hope to experiment with other types of neural networks like convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks to clamp down on the spread of malware even further. 
 
The Regsister:     Arvix
 
You Might Also Read:
 
Malware Attacks Drop As Encrypted Attacks Increase:
 
Five Hi -Tech Ways To Fight Off Cyber Attackers:
 
 
 
« US National Security Agency’s Cyber Offensive
Is The Cloud Skills Gap A Problem? »

CyberSecurity Jobsite
Perimeter 81

Directory of Suppliers

Syxsense

Syxsense

Syxsense brings together endpoint management and security for greater efficiency and collaboration between IT management and security teams.

Jooble

Jooble

Jooble is a job search aggregator operating in 71 countries worldwide. We simplify the job search process by displaying active job ads from major job boards and career sites across the internet.

Authentic8

Authentic8

Authentic8 transforms how organizations secure and control the use of the web with Silo, its patented cloud browser.

ManageEngine

ManageEngine

As the IT management division of Zoho Corporation, ManageEngine prioritizes flexible solutions that work for all businesses, regardless of size or budget.

NordLayer

NordLayer

NordLayer is an adaptive network access security solution for modern businesses — from the world’s most trusted cybersecurity brand, Nord Security. 

CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike is a global provider of security technology and services focused on identifying advanced threats and targeted attacks.

Veracode

Veracode

Veracode delivers the most widely used cloud-based platform for securing web, mobile, legacy and third-party enterprise applications.

International Security Management Association (ISMA)

International Security Management Association (ISMA)

ISMA is an international security association of senior security executives from major business organizations located worldwide.

GE Digital

GE Digital

GE Digital is a leading software company for the Industrial Internet. Products include Industrial Cyber Security for Operational Technology (OT).

Comarch

Comarch

Comarch is a provider of IT business solutions to optimize operational and business processes. Cyber security solutions are focused on Identity Management and Security Assessment services.

CyberGreen Institute

CyberGreen Institute

The CyberGreen Institute is a global non-profit and collaborative organization conducting activities focused on helping to improve the health of the global Cyber Ecosystem.

Genians

Genians

Genians provides the industry’s leading Network Access Control (NAC) solution, which ensures full visibility of all IP-enabled devices regardless of whether they are wired, wireless, or virtual.

The Security Company (TSC)

The Security Company (TSC)

The Security Company is a leading provider of creative employee security awareness programmes.

Blackpoint Cyber

Blackpoint Cyber

Blackpoint’s mission is to provide effective, affordable real-time threat detection and response to organizations of all sizes around the world.

SterlingRisk Programs

SterlingRisk Programs

SterlingRisk’s Cyber practice brings experience working with a wide array of clients across a broad spectrum of industries.

Internet Security Research Group (ISRG)

Internet Security Research Group (ISRG)

ISRG's mission is to reduce financial, technological, and educational barriers to secure communication over the Internet.

Axiado

Axiado

Axiado Corporation is a security processor company redefining hardware root of trust with hardware-based security technologies, including per-system AI.

Policy Monitor

Policy Monitor

Policy Monitor is a cyber security company founded by experts with extensive experience in operational and risk management.

ResilientX

ResilientX

ResilientX is an All-In-One Security Testing Platform designed to help MSPs and SMBs to perform their security testing and assessments without having to outsource IT.

Filigran

Filigran

Filigran provides threat intelligence, adversary simulation and crisis response open solutions to thousands of cybersecurity and crisis management teams across the world.

Methods

Methods

Methods is the leading digital transformation partner for the UK public sector. We care deeply about making our public services better and have been doing this for over 28 years.