The most common malignancy observed among Indian women is the breast cancer. However, the cancer is detectable earlier by means of mammograms. Computer Aided Diagnostic (CAD) techniques are the boon to medical industry and these techniques intend to support the physicians in diagnosis. In this paper, a novel CAD system for the detection and classification of the abnormalities in the mammogram is presented. The proposed work is organized into four important phases and they are pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction and classification. The pre-processing phase intends to remove unwanted noise and make the mammograms suitable for the next process. The segmentation phase aims to extract the areas of interest to proceed with further process. Feature extraction is the most important phase, which is meant for extracting the texture features from the area of interest. This work employs pseudo zernike moments for extracting features, owing to the noise resistance power and description ability. Finally, Support Vector Machine (SVM) is employed as the classifier, so as to distinguish between the malignant and normal mammograms. The performance of the proposed work is evaluated by several experimentations and the results are satisfactory in terms of accuracy, specificity and sensitivity.