Netskope debuts as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™️ for Single-Vendor Secure Access Service Edge Get the report

close
close
  • Why Netskope chevron

    Changing the way networking and security work together.

  • Our Customers chevron

    Netskope serves more than 3,400 customers worldwide including more than 30 of the Fortune 100

  • Our Partners chevron

    We partner with security leaders to help you secure your journey to the cloud.

A Leader in SSE.
Now a Leader in Single-Vendor SASE.

Learn why Netskope debuted as a leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™️ for Single-Vendor Secure Access Service Edge

Get the report
Customer Visionary Spotlights

Read how innovative customers are successfully navigating today’s changing networking & security landscape through the Netskope One platform.

Get the eBook
Customer Visionary Spotlights
Netskope’s partner-centric go-to-market strategy enables our partners to maximize their growth and profitability while transforming enterprise security.

Learn about Netskope Partners
Group of diverse young professionals smiling
Your Network of Tomorrow

Plan your path toward a faster, more secure, and more resilient network designed for the applications and users that you support.

Get the white paper
Your Network of Tomorrow
Introducing the Netskope One Platform

Netskope One is a cloud-native platform that offers converged security and networking services to enable your SASE and zero trust transformation.

Learn about Netskope One
Abstract with blue lighting
Embrace a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture

Netskope NewEdge is the world’s largest, highest-performing security private cloud and provides customers with unparalleled service coverage, performance and resilience.

Learn about NewEdge
NewEdge
Netskope Cloud Exchange

The Netskope Cloud Exchange (CE) provides customers with powerful integration tools to leverage investments across their security posture.

Learn about Cloud Exchange
Aerial view of a city
The platform of the future is Netskope

Intelligent Security Service Edge (SSE), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Cloud Firewall, Next Generation Secure Web Gateway (SWG), and Private Access for ZTNA built natively into a single solution to help every business on its journey to Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture.

Go to Products Overview
Netskope video
Next Gen SASE Branch is hybrid — connected, secured, and automated

Netskope Next Gen SASE Branch converges Context-Aware SASE Fabric, Zero-Trust Hybrid Security, and SkopeAI-powered Cloud Orchestrator into a unified cloud offering, ushering in a fully modernized branch experience for the borderless enterprise.

Learn about Next Gen SASE Branch
People at the open space office
Designing a SASE Architecture For Dummies

Get your complimentary copy of the only guide to SASE design you’ll ever need.

Get the eBook
Make the move to market-leading cloud security services with minimal latency and high reliability.

Learn about NewEdge
Lighted highway through mountainside switchbacks
Safely enable the use of generative AI applications with application access control, real-time user coaching, and best-in-class data protection.

Learn how we secure generative AI use
Safely Enable ChatGPT and Generative AI
Zero trust solutions for SSE and SASE deployments

Learn about Zero Trust
Boat driving through open sea
Netskope achieves FedRAMP High Authorization

Choose Netskope GovCloud to accelerate your agency’s transformation.

Learn about Netskope GovCloud
Netskope GovCloud
  • Resources chevron

    Learn more about how Netskope can help you secure your journey to the cloud.

  • Blog chevron

    Learn how Netskope enables security and networking transformation through secure access service edge (SASE)

  • Events and Workshops chevron

    Stay ahead of the latest security trends and connect with your peers.

  • Security Defined chevron

    Everything you need to know in our cybersecurity encyclopedia.

Security Visionaries Podcast

The Future of Security: Quantum, AI, and Macro-political Change
Emily Wearmouth and Max Havey speak with Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri and CTO Krishna Narayanaswamy about the future of security.

Play the podcast Browse all podcasts
The Future of Security: Quantum, AI, and Macro-political Change
Latest Blogs

Read how Netskope can enable the Zero Trust and SASE journey through secure access service edge (SASE) capabilities.

Read the blog
Sunrise and cloudy sky
SASE Week 2024 On-Demand

Learn how to navigate the latest advancements in SASE and zero trust and explore how these frameworks are adapting to address cybersecurity and infrastructure challenges

Explore sessions
SASE Week 2024
What is SASE?

Learn about the future convergence of networking and security tools in today’s cloud dominant business model.

Learn about SASE
  • Company chevron

    We help you stay ahead of cloud, data, and network security challenges.

  • Careers chevron

    Join Netskope's 3,000+ amazing team members building the industry’s leading cloud-native security platform.

  • Customer Solutions chevron

    We are here for you and with you every step of the way, ensuring your success with Netskope.

  • Training and Accreditations chevron

    Netskope training will help you become a cloud security expert.

Supporting sustainability through data security

Netskope is proud to participate in Vision 2045: an initiative aimed to raise awareness on private industry’s role in sustainability.

Find out more
Supporting Sustainability Through Data Security
Help shape the future of cloud security

At Netskope, founders and leaders work shoulder-to-shoulder with their colleagues, even the most renowned experts check their egos at the door, and the best ideas win.

Join the team
Careers at Netskope
Netskope’s talented and experienced Professional Services team provides a prescriptive approach to your successful implementation.

Learn about Professional Services
Netskope Professional Services
Secure your digital transformation journey and make the most of your cloud, web, and private applications with Netskope training.

Learn about Training and Certifications
Group of young professionals working

AI/ML for Malware Detection

Sep 02 2021

This is the fourth in an ongoing series of blogs focused on AI/ML.  

Malware detection is an important part of the Netskope Security Cloud platform, complete with a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture, that we provide to our customers. Malware is malicious software that is designed to harm or exploit devices and computer systems. Various types of malware, such as viruses, worms, Trojan horses, ransomware, and spyware, remain a serious problem for corporations and government agencies. Traditional malware detection systems rely on anti-virus signatures, heuristics, and behavior patterns in sandboxes, which require a significant amount of manual analysis from security analysts and researchers. With new attacks and variants emerging every day, it is hard for organizations to keep pace with malware threats. In comparison, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) has the potential to detect unknown and zero-day malware by automatically learning the malware patterns based on large volumes of historical data. This unique capability has made AI/ML an indispensable part of a modern malware detection solution, complementing heuristic and signature-based approaches. 

At Netskope, we have developed a comprehensive, multi-layered threat protection system to scan our customers’ network traffic. AI/ML is used to power multiple engines in the inline fast scan, as well as static and dynamic analysis-based deep scan. In this blog post, we will highlight three of them:

  • Inline PE Classifier
  • MS Office Classifier
  • Cloud Sandbox

Inline PE Classifier

The Portable Executable (PE) file format is used by Windows executables, object code, and dynamic link libraries (DLLs). It’s one of the most common malware file formats. To stop malicious PE files in real-time, we have developed the inline PE classifier. Trained with millions of malicious and benign PE samples, the ML-based classifier is able to identify malware patterns in raw bytes. The classifier doesn’t need to parse a PE file and extract features based on domain knowledge. Therefore, it’s lightweight, fast, and suitable for inline predictions.

The inline PE classifier complements the signature-based malware engines in fast scan. Since its launch, the classifier has detected unique malware samples that were undetectable to signature-based inline engines, without introducing any new false positives. Its runtime in production is just a few milliseconds.

This high efficacy ML classifier enables faster time to detection for unique detections that can be blocked inline and complements the dynamic analysis with advanced forensics in the Advanced Threat Protection engines.

MS Office Classifier

Microsoft Office documents are another common source of malware. As part of Netskope’s Advanced Threat Protection, the Office Classifier is designed to leverage a combination of heuristics and supervised machine learning to identify malicious code embedded in Office documents. The Office Classifier performs static analysis and extracts detailed information about the components in an Office file, including embedded macros (VBA), dynamic data exchange (DDE), and other jpg/mpeg or EXE/PE files. The extracted information is then mapped to hundreds of features to train ML classification models and predict whether a new Office document is malicious or not.

The Office Classifier provides proactive coverage against zero-day malware attacks that can evade signature-based detections. For example, the Office Classifier has detected downloads of multiple zero-day Emotet samples distributed as Office document files targeting multiple Netskope customers (see screenshot below). The Emotet samples used multi-layered obfuscation techniques to bypass signature-based AV software but were detected by the Office Classifier. Recently, the Office Classifier also detected a new set of malicious Office documents that use VBA and LoLbins.

Screenshot of the Office Classifier detecting downloads of multiple zero-day Emotet samples distributed as Office document files

Cloud Sandbox

Sandbox has been proven to be an effective way to detect advanced malware. The Cloud Sandbox is enhanced with a machine learning engine in Netskope’s Advanced Threat Protection system. The Cloud Sandbox collects sample behaviors by executing them in an isolated Windows environment. The report of observed behaviors can then be used for heuristics and ML-based malware detection. Each report contains runtime behavior, such as process trees, where each tree node represents the behavior of a process, including API calls, dynamic link libraries (DLL), registry key activities, file activities, and network activities. We use deep learning transformer techniques to learn the tree structure and activities of the sandbox report and classify whether the file is malicious or not. 

Diagram of process trees

Summary

At Netskope, we have integrated AI/ML into our large-scale malware detection system to power multiple static and dynamic analysis engines. It is clear that AI/ML can identify unknown malware with great precision and complement other signature and heuristic engines. There are technical challenges associated with AI/ML, including high accuracy and low latency requirements, changing malware patterns, and model interpretability. We are addressing these challenges to reach AI/ML’s full potential in malware detection.

author image
Yihua Liao
Dr. Yihua Liao is the Head of AI Labs at Netskope. His team develops cutting-edge AI/ML technology to tackle many challenging problems in cloud security.

Stay informed!

Subscribe for the latest from the Netskope Blog