Fighting malware with machine learning | Avast

Introduction

As one of the leading companies in computer security, we work hard every day to bring the highest level of protection to all of our users. This requires us to constantly explore new ways of defeating malware, often experimenting with bleeding edge technology or approaches that have never been tried in our environment before - borrowing ideas from fields like biology or physics. Many of these experiments never deliver anything substantial but sometimes the results exceed even our most optimistic expectations. Here, I would like to talk about one such experiment. We started it over six years ago and it evolved into a system that quickly became one of the strongest malware detection engines we use at Avast today.