System and method for detecting malicious scripts

An endpoint system receives a target file for evaluation for malicious scripts. The original content of the target file is normalized and stored in a normalized buffer. Tokens in the normalized buffer are translated to symbols, which are stored in a tokenized buffer. Strings in the normalized buffer are stored in a string buffer. Tokens that are indicative of syntactical structure of the normalized content are extracted from the normalized buffer and stored in a structure buffer. The content of the tokenized buffer and counts of tokens represented as symbols in the tokenized buffer are compared against heuristic rules indicative of malicious scripts. The contents of the tokenized buffer and string buffer are compared against signatures of malicious scripts. The contents of the tokenized buffer, string buffer, and structure buffer are input to a machine learning model that has been trained to detect malicious scripts.