Using capa Rules for Android Malware Detection cloud.google.com/blog/topi…

Mobile devices have become the go-to for daily tasks like online banking, healthcare management, and personal photo storage, making them prime targets for malicious actors seeking to exploit valuable information. Bad actors often turn to publishing and distributing malware via apps as a lucrative channel for generating illegal and/or unethical profits.

To combat these new challenges, Android Security and Privacy Team is partnering with Mandiant FLARE to extend the open-source binary analysis tool capa to analyze native ARM ELF files targeting Android. Together, we improved existing and developed new capa rules to detect capabilities observed in Android malware, used the capa rule matches to highlight the highly suspicious code in native files, and prompted Gemini with the highlighted code behaviors for summarization to enhance our review processes for faster decisions.