Protecting from Zero-Day Malware Attacks

Abstract

The menace of malware is becoming more harmful and ominous for the enterprises as well as the home users. The malware attacks usually cause users to render their critical data in the hands of nefarious persons. Shielding against the malware attacks seems a challenging job for IT administrators. The common solutions that provide protection against malware are known as signature based anti-malware solution. These solutions works on the blacklisting technique which seems unsuccessful when it comes to sophisticated zero-day malware attacks. However, a newly emerging technique, the whitelisting provides best protection against zero-day malware attacks by only allowing legitimate services, processes, applications and websites to run on the machine. The whitelisting technique maintains list of the trusted applications and allows only these listed executables to execute only while preventing all other threats to be executed. In this paper we proposed a light weight zero-day anti-malware solution. The solution uses whitelisting and also accounts for specific advantages of blacklisting technique. The validation of the proposed solution proves effectiveness and efficiency. It requires low CPU and memory usage and does not require bandwidth or Internet. In short, it is simple and light weight as compared to signature based anti-malware solutions.