Software Diagnostics Institute

A malnarrative is an intentionally modified narrative for malicious purposes. This word comes from the so-called malware narratives and their patterns. Malware narratives are just software traces and logs (for example, system logs and network traces) that contain diagnostic indicators (signs) pointing to possible or actual malware presence and execution. Therefore, malware narrative analysis patterns are based on general software trace and log analysis patterns as a part of pattern-oriented software diagnostics and forensics. Whereas, malware narratives result from planned alteration of structure and behaviour of software to serve malicious purposes with resulting narratives incidentally revealing malware, malnarratives are planned alterations of narratives themselves. Because software narratives are based on software narratology (which is an application of general narratology) the extensive trace and log analysis pattern catalogue (more than 90 patterns at the time of this writing) can be used to analyse and detect such patterns in non-software narratives. For example, it can be used for analysis of cyberspace narratives such as social media narratives (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) and even traditional media narratives such as news, stories, and books. Such pattern-oriented analysis of malnarratives can be used not only in security but also in intelligence analysis (MDAA, Volume 6) and information operations (IO), for example, in information warfare (IW).