The continuous increase in malware samples, both in sophistication and number, presents many challenges for organizations and analysts, who must cope with thousands of new heterogeneous samples daily. This requires robust methods to quickly determine whether a file is malicious. Due to its speed and efficiency, static analysis is the first line of defense.
In this work, we illustrate how the practical state-of-the-art methods used by antivirus solutions may fail to detect evident malware traces. The reason is that they highly depend on very strict signatures where minor deviations prevent them from detecting shellcodes that otherwise would immediately be flagged as malicious. Thus, our findings illustrate that malware authors may drastically decrease the detections by converting the code base to less-used programming languages. To this end, we study the features that such programming languages introduce in executables and the practical issues that arise for practitioners to detect malicious activity.

Due to its critical role in cybersecurity, digital forensics has received significant attention from researchers and practitioners alike. The ever increasing sophistication of modern cyberattacks is directly related to the complexity of evidence acquisition, which often requires the use of several technologies. To date, researchers have presented many surveys and reviews on the field. However, such articles focused on the advances of each particular domain of digital forensics individually. Therefore, while each of these surveys facilitates researchers and practitioners to keep up with the latest advances in a particular domain of digital forensics, the global perspective is missing. Aiming to fill this gap, we performed a qualitative review of all the relevant reviews in the field of digital forensics, determined the main topics on digital forensics topics and identified their main challenges. Despite the diversity of topics and methods, there are several common problems that are faced by almost all of them, with most of them residing in evidence acquisition and pre-processing due to counter analysis methods and difficulties of collecting data from devices, the cloud etc. Beyond pure technical issues, our study highlights procedural issues in terms of readiness, reporting and presentation, as well as ethics, highlighting the European perspective which is traditionally stricter in terms of privacy. Our extensive analysis paves the way for closer collaboration among researcher and practitioners among different topics of digital forensics.