November issue of VB published

Posted by   Virus Bulletin on   Nov 1, 2013

The November issue of Virus Bulletin is now available for subscribers to download.

The November 2013 issue of Virus Bulletin is now available for subscribers to browse online or download in PDF or PRC (Kindle) format.

Some of the things this month's issue has in store are:

• Perhaps email is broken after all: 'If anyone were to invent SMTP today and decide it was a good idea for messages to be sent in plain text, they would receive short shrift.' Martijn Grooten considers the current state of email in light of recent security-related incidents.

• VB2013: Berlin time: The first week of October saw the 23rd anniversary of German reunification and the 23rd Virus Bulletin International Conference - in Berlin. Helen Martin reports on the latter.

• Another tussle with Tussie: When one has a nice idea - such as a tricky method for encoding data - it is common to take that idea and improve on it. It is rare to see someone take such an idea and degenerate it, but that's exactly what we see in W32/Tussie.B. Peter Ferrie reports.

• Neurevt bot analysis: Neurevt is a relatively new HTTP bot that already has a lot of functionalities along with an extendable and flexible infrastructure. Zhongchun Huo takes a detailed look at its infrastructure, communication protocol and encryption scheme.

• When ZAccess becomes a debugger: ZAccess (a.k.a. ZeroAccess) is a complex botnet with many different variants and updates to the malware having been observed over several years. In June He Xu and colleagues found and analysed some variants which integrated a debugger engine. He takes a look at some of the features in those variants.

• The murky waters of the Internet: anatomy of malvertising and other e-threats: According to the Online Trust Alliance, almost 10 billion ad impressions were compromised by malvertising in 2012 and malvertising incidents increased by more than 250% from Q1 2010 to Q2 2010. In this article, Bianca Stanescu and colleagues look at the evolving phenomenon of malvertising and offer some guidelines to help users and legitimate advertisers avoid these threats.

• Greetz from academe: Monkey vs. Python: Python obfuscation is relatively rare. In the latest of his 'Greetz from academe' series, highlighting some of the work going on in academic circles, John Aycock takes a look at a research paper in which the authors reverse engineered a 'hardened' Python application from Dropbox.

Note: The November 2013 VBSpam comparative review will be published as standalone article later in the month. As with all new VB100 and VBSpam reviews, the report will be available for non-subscribers to purchase as a standalone item (Virus Bulletin subscribers will be notified by email when the comparative is available to download). Non-subscribers can purchase VB100 reports here and VBSpam reports here.

Subscribers click here to access the issue.

If you are not already a subscriber why not take the chance to subscribe now.

Posted on 05 November 2013 by Virus Bulletin

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