EMBER2024 Dataset

EMBER2024 is an update to the EMBER2017 and EMBER2018 datasets. It includes raw features and labels for 3.2 million malicious and benign files from 6 different file types (Win32, Win64, .NET, APK, ELF, and PDF). EMBER2024 is meant to allow researchers to explore a variety of common malware analysis classification tasks. The dataset includes 7 types of labels and tags that support malicious/benign detection, malware family classification, malware behavior prediction, and more.

Paper about the classifiers: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05074

Instructions for downloading EMBER2024 and training classifiers: https://github.com/FutureComputing4AI/EMBER2024/

EMBER2024 Contents

EMBER2024 includes features and labels for malware that was first uploaded to VirusTotal between Sep. 24th, 2023 and Dec. 14th, 2024. There are exactly 50,500 files chosen from each week of that time period, with the first 52 weeks of files making up the training set and the last 12 going to the test set. This lets researchers simulate how effectively a classifier might detect malware that is newer than its training corpus. In total, the training set is 2,626,000 files and the test set is 606,000 files.

File Statistics

File Type	Malicious + Benign (Weekly)	Train Total	Test Total
Win32	30,000	1,560,000	360,000
Win64	10,000	520,000	120,000
.NET	5,000	260,000	60,000
APK	4,000	208,000	48,000
PDF	1,000	52,000	12,000
ELF	500	26,000	6,000

Challenge Set

EMBER also includes features and labels for 6,315 malicious files in a "challenge set". These files initially went undetected by ~70 antivirus products on VirusTotal but were later found to be malicious. The challenge set is an excellent resource for assessing how well a machine larning classifier is able to detect evasive malware.

EMBER Feature Version 3

The previous EMBER feature versions were pinned to LIEF version 0.9.0, which requires Python 3.6. EMBER feature version 3 ("thrember") is a re-implementation of the EMBER feature vector format that uses the pefile library instead. pefile is stable and has no dependencies, making it ideal going forward. We have also made several addition to the EMBER feature vector format, which now includes features from the DOS header, Rich header, PE data directories, Authenticode signatures, and warnings during PE parsing. Furthermore, we have added support for feature extraction from non-PE files using a subset of the EMBER feature version 3 format. We show that effective classifiers for APK, ELF, and PDF files can be trained using just features from general file info, byte statistics, and string statistics.

Capa

Capa is a malware analysis tool that identifies a file's potential behaviors. For each file, it outputs Mitre ATT&CK techniques, objectives and behaviors from the Malware Behavior Catalogue Matrix, and other capabilities. An example is shown below.

+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| ATT&CK Tactic        | ATT&CK Technique                                                          |
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| COLLECTION           | Clipboard Data [T1115]                                                    |
|                      | Input Capture::Keylogging [T1056.001]                                     |
|                      | Screen Capture [T1113]                                                    |
| DEFENSE EVASION      | File and Directory Permissions Modification [T1222]                       |
|                      | Obfuscated Files or Information [T1027]                                   |
| EXECUTION            | Shared Modules [T1129]                                                    |
| PRIVILEGE ESCALATION | Access Token Manipulation [T1134]                                         |
| ...                  | ...                                                                       |
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| MBC Objective            | MBC Behavior                                                          |
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| ANTI-BEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS | Debugger Detection::Software Breakpoints [B0001.025]                  |
|                          | Debugger Detection::Timing/Delay Check GetTickCount [B0001.032]       |
| COLLECTION               | Keylogging::Polling [F0002.002]                                       |
|                          | Screen Capture::WinAPI [E1113.m01]                                    |
| COMMAND AND CONTROL      | C2 Communication::Receive Data [B0030.002]                            |
|                          | C2 Communication::Send Data [B0030.001]                               |
| ...                      | ...                                                                   |
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Capability                                          | Namespace                                  |
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| log keystrokes via polling (9 matches)              | collection/keylog                          |
| capture screenshot (2 matches)                      | collection/screenshot                      |
| receive data (5 matches)                            | communication                              |
| send data (2 matches)                               | communication                              |
| create HTTP request                                 | communication/http/client                  |
| get socket status                                   | communication/socket                       |
| ...                                                 | ...                                        |
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

EMBER2024 has been updated to include Capa results for Win32, Win64, .NET, and ELF files.

{
  "caps": [
    {"Capability": "Find process by name", "Namespace": "host-interaction/process/list", "Addrs": []},
    {"Capability": "Terminate process", "Namespace": "host-interaction/process/terminate", "Addrs": ["0x6000025"]},
    {"Capability": "Move file", "Namespace": "host-interaction/file-system/move", "Addrs": []},
    ...
  ],
  "ttps": [
    {"Tactic": "DISCOVERY", "Technique": "Process Discovery [T1057]"},
    {"Tactic": "DISCOVERY", "Technique": "File and Directory Discovery [T1083]"}
  ],
  "mbc": [
    {"Objective": "OPERATING SYSTEM", "Behavior": "Console [C0033]"},
    {"Objective": "PROCESS", "Behavior": "Terminate Process [C0018]"},
    {"Objective": "FILE SYSTEM", "Behavior": "Move File [C0063]"},
    {"Objective": "DISCOVERY", "Behavior": "File and Directory Discovery [E1083]"},
    ....
  ],
  ...
}

In many cases, Capa identifies the function(s) that the capability is present in. We created a supplemental dataset with the raw bytes and disassembly of 16,356,790 functions from malicious files in EMBER2024.

Citing

If you use EMBER2024 in your own research, please cite it using:

@inproceedings{joyce2025ember,
      title={EMBER2024 - A Benchmark Dataset for Holistic Evaluation of Malware Classifiers},
      author={Robert J. Joyce and Gideon Miller and Phil Roth and Richard Zak and Elliott Zaresky-Williams and Hyrum Anderson and Edward Raff and James Holt},
      year={2025},
      booktitle={Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining},
}