Journal of Cybersecurity and Information Management JCIM 2690-6775 2769-7851 10.54216/JCIM https://www.americaspg.com/journals/show/1413 2019 2019 Detection and Classification of Malware Using Guided Whale Optimization Algorithm for Voting Ensemble Faculty of Artificial Intelligence, Delta University for Science and Technology, Mansoura 35712, Egypt Marwa Marwa Communications and Electronics Department at Delta Higher Institute for Engineering and Technology, Mansoura- Egypt M. I. Fath Allah Malware is software that is designed to cause damage to computer systems. Locating malicious software is a crucial task in the cybersecurity industry. Malware authors and security experts are locked in a never-ending conflict. In order to combat modern malware, which often exhibits polymorphic behavior and a wide range of characteristics, novel countermeasures have had to be created. Here, we present a hybrid learning approach to malware detection and classification. In this scenario, we have merged the machine learning techniques of Random Forest and K-Nearest Neighbor Classifier to develop a hybrid learning model. We used current malware and an updated dataset of 10,000 examples of malicious and benign files, with 78 feature values and 6 different malware classes to deal with. We compared the model's results with those of current approaches after training it for both binary and multi-class classification. The suggested methodology may be utilized to create an anti-malware application that is capable of detecting malware on newly collected data. 2022 2022 34 42 10.54216/JCIM.100102 https://www.americaspg.com/articleinfo/2/show/1413