Malware poses one of the most serious threats to computer information systems. The current detection technology of malware has several inherent constraints. Because signature-based traditional techniques embedded in commercial antiviruses are not capable of detecting new and obfuscated malware, machine learning algorithms are applied in identifing patterns of malware behavior through features extracted from programs. There, a method is presented for detecting malware based on the features extracted from the PE header and section table PE files. The packed files are detected and then unpacke them. The PE file features are extracted and their static features are selected from PE header and section tables through forward selection method. The files are classified into malware files and clean files throughs different classification methods. The best results are obtained through DT classifier with an accuracy of 98.26%. The results of the experiments consist of 971 executable files containing 761 malware and 210 clean files with an accuracy of 98.26%.