UTSA wins global cyber security challenge

The AICS 2019 Challenge, sponsored by the Crowdstrike Foundation and organized by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, tasked researchers from around the world to devise a system that can classify several types of extremely harmful malware which have adapted to evade IT security measures and can remain undetected inside computer systems for years. Shouhuai Xu, director of UTSA's Laboratory for Cybersecurity Dynamics and professor in the UTSA Department of Computer Science, formed and led an international team that created a framework using deep neural networks to classify and detect the malware. The MIT Lincoln Laboratory made the challenge extra difficult because "white-hat" hackers had access to a limited training data set with an unbalanced number of malwares. Moreover, each competing team had to propose a real-world solution after being given access to the MIT testing data for just one week. "The Challenge is as realistic as what a cyber defender would encounter in the wild, because little information about the'attacks' is given to us," said Xu. "This exercise mimics what happens in the real world."