• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.754-762
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• 2010

Nowadays, email-based targeted attacks using malcode-bearing documents have been steadily increased. To improve the success rate of the attack and avoid anti-viruses, attackers mainly employ zero-day exploits and relevant social engineering techniques. In this paper, we propose an architecture of the email vaccine cloud system to prevent targeted attacks using malcode-bearing documents. The system extracts attached document files from email messages, performs behavior analysis as well as signature-based detection in the virtual machine environment, and completely removes malicious documents from the messages. In the process of behavior analysis, the documents are regarded as malicious ones in cases of creating executable files, launching new processes, accessing critical registry entries, connecting to the Internet. The email vaccine cloud system will help prevent various cyber terrors such as information leakages by preventing email based targeted attacks.