Machine learning in cybersecurity: A review

Machine learning technology has become mainstream in a large number of domains, and cybersecurity applications of machine learning techniques are plenty. Examples include malware analysis, especially for zero‐day malware detection, threat analysis, anomaly based intrusion detection of prevalent attacks on critical infrastructures, and many others. Due to the ineffectiveness of signature‐based methods in detecting zero day attacks or even slight variants of known attacks, machine learning‐based detection is being used by researchers in many cybersecurity products. In this review, we discuss several areas of cybersecurity where machine learning is used as a tool. We also provide a few glimpses of adversarial attacks on machine learning algorithms to manipulate training and test data of classifiers, to render such tools ineffective. This article is categorized under: Application Areas > Science and Technology Technologies > Machine Learning Technologies > Classification Application Areas > Data Mining Software Tools