ESET: Machine learning for malware clustering (industry PhD) 

Besides malware detection, ESET also performs binary file clustering to get accurate segment information about hundreds of thousands of newly created files every day. This is not a trivial task – as the lines between similar and dissimilar software can be oftentimes very small and can also change with time. 

Our main goal is to contribute to malware clustering research by improving the performance of malware clustering on large numbers of samples mainly in terms of clustering quality. We focus on creating representations of malware that are adapted for the sole purpose of malware clustering, thereby having a chance to improve the precision of clustering methods. 

There are three main areas of research we focus on – improving malware clustering using an end-to-end clustering framework, utilizing neural networks or other intelligent approaches to create the best representations for clustering, and improving the way of assessing the quality of clustering, where currently we mainly rely on the feedback from domain experts.