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Seminar: Malware Analysis & Detection Research: A Journey Across Time, Space, Hardware, and Software
Tuesday, August 4, 2026 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT
Speaker
Dr. Marcus Botacin
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University
Abstract
Malware has been a long-standing challenge for computer system users, as determining whether an arbitrary software program is malicious or benign is fundamentally undecidable. Despite this limitation, decades of research have enabled scientists and practitioners to control the malware problem by progressively narrowing it into smaller and more manageable layers through the defense-in-depth paradigm. However, malware can never be fully eliminated, as the underlying problem remains undecidable. Moreover, every emerging technology—such as artificial intelligence—forces defenders to develop new approximations and narrowing strategies, making malware a continually evolving challenge and more relevant than ever. In this talk, Dr. Botacin presents how modern defenses narrow the malware problem into a pipeline of techniques for collecting, triaging, tracing, and matching malware samples. Research developed at the Botacin Lab is used to exemplify advances at each stage, including custom LLMs for YARA-rule-based malware hunting, biclustering algorithms for malware variant triage, fuzzing-guided tracing of evasive malware, and hardware-assisted malware detection for zero-trust environments. Finally, Dr. Botacin discusses how defenders can anticipate attackers’ next moves by developing approximations for future threats, including the synthetic generation of malware with LLM support and its use for proactively retraining antivirus systems.
Speaker’s Bio
Dr. Botacin is a Computer Science Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University (TAMU, USA) since 2022. Ph.D. in Computer Science (UFPR, Brazil), Master’s in Computer Science and Computer Engineering (UNICAMP, Brazil). Malware Analyst since 2012. Specialist in AV engines and Sandbox Development. Dr. Botacin published research papers at major academic conferences (USENIX Security) and journals (ACM TOPS, IEEE TDSC). Dr. Botacin also presented his work at major industry and hacking conferences, such as HackInTheBox and Hou.Sec.Con. Currently, Dr. Botacin serves as Associate Editor for Elsevier’s Computers & Security journal.