One of the innovations brought by Mirai and its derived malware is the adoption of self-contained loaders for infecting IoT devices and recruiting them in botnets. Functionally decoupled from other botnet components and not embedded in the payload, loaders cannot be analysed using conventional approaches that rely on honeypots for capturing samples. Different approaches are necessary for studying the loaders evolution and defining a genealogy. To address the insufficient knowledge about loaders' lineage in existing studies, in this paper, we propose a semantic-aware method to measure, categorize, and compare different loader servers, with the goal of highlighting their evolution, independent from the payload evolution. Leveraging behavior-based metrics, we cluster the discovered loaders and define eight families to determine the genealogy and draw a homology map. Our study shows that the source code of Mirai is evolving and spawning new botnets with new capabilities, both on the client side and the server side. In turn, shedding light on the infection loaders can help the cybersecurity community to improve detection and prevention tools.

In recent years, the scale and diversity of malicious software on mobile networks have grown significantly, thereby causing considerable danger to users’ property and personal privacy. In this study, we propose a malware detection method that uses the URLs visited by apps to identify malware. A multi-view neural network is used to create a malware detection model that emphasizes depth and width. This neural network can create multiple views of inputs automatically and distribute soft attention weights to focus on different features of inputs. Multiple views preserve rich semantic information from inputs for classification without requiring complicated feature engineering. In addition, we conduct comprehensive experiments to compare the proposed method with others and verify the validity of the detection model. The experimental results show that our method achieves robust and timely malware detection. It can not only effectively detect malware discovered in different months of a certain year, but also detect potentially malicious apps in the third-party app market. We also compare the detection results of the proposed method on wild apps with 10 popular anti-virus scanners, and the final result shows that our approach ranks second in terms of detection performance.