Title: DeepAPT: Nation-State APT Attribution Using End-to-End Deep Neural Networks,
Abstract: In recent years numerous advanced malware, aka advanced persistent threats
(APT) are allegedly developed by nation-states. The task of attributing an APT
to a specific nation-state is extremely challenging for several reasons. Each
nation-state has usually more than a single cyber unit that develops such
advanced malware, rendering traditional authorship attribution algorithms
useless. Furthermore, those APTs use state-of-the-art evasion techniques,
making feature extraction challenging. Finally, the dataset of such available
APTs is extremely small.
In this paper we describe how deep neural networks (DNN) could be
successfully employed for nation-state APT attribution. We use sandbox reports
(recording the behavior of the APT when run dynamically) as raw input for the
neural network, allowing the DNN to learn high level feature abstractions of
the APTs itself. Using a test set of 1,000 Chinese and Russian developed APTs,
we achieved an accuracy rate of 94.6%.