VB Blog

VB2018 paper: Draw me like one of your French APTs – expanding our descriptive palette for cyber threat actors

Posted by Martijn Grooten on Jan 7, 2019

Today, we publish the VB2018 paper by Chronicle researcher Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, who argues we should change the way we talk about APT actors.

Posted by Martijn Grooten on Dec 19, 2018

VB Editor Martijn Grooten reviews Charles Arthur's Cyber Wars, which looks at seven prominent hacks and attacks, and the lessons we can learn from them.

Posted by Martijn Grooten on Dec 14, 2018

At VB2018 Sophos researcher Gábor Szappanos provided a detailed overview of Office exploit builders, and looked in particular at the widely exploited CVE-2017-0199. Today we publish his paper and release the video of his presentation.

Posted by Martijn Grooten on Dec 12, 2018

Today, we release the video of the VB2018 presentation by Check Point researcher Aseel Kayal, who connected the various dots relating to campaigns by the APT-C-23 threat group.

Posted by Martijn Grooten on Dec 11, 2018

VB calls on organisations and individuals involved in threat intelligence from around the world to participate in next year's Virus Bulletin conference.

Posted by Martijn Grooten on Dec 7, 2018

Today, we publish the VB2018 paper by Qihoo 360 researchers Ya Liu and Hui Wang, on extracting data from variants of the Mirai botnet to classify and track variants.

Posted by Martijn Grooten on Dec 6, 2018

2018 has seen an increase in the variety of botnets living on the Internet of Things - such as Hide'N'Seek, which is notable for its use of peer-to-peer for command-and-control communication. Today, we publish the VB2018 paper by Bitdefender researchers Adrian Șendroiu and Vladimir Diaconescu, who studied the Hide'N'Seek IoT botnet. We also release the recording of their presentation.

Posted by Martijn Grooten on Dec 4, 2018

In a new paper, Avast researchers Jan Sirmer and Adolf Streda look at how a spam campaign sent via the Necurs botnet was delivering the Flawed Ammyy RAT. As well as publishing the paper, we have also released the video of the reseachers' VB2018 presentation on the same topic.

Posted by Martijn Grooten on Nov 29, 2018

Today we have published the video of the VB2018 presentation by Andrew Brandt (Sophos) on the SamSam ransomware, which became hot news following the indictment of its two suspected authors yesterday.

Posted by Martijn Grooten on Nov 28, 2018

Today, we publish the video of the VB2018 presentation by CitizenLab researchers Masashi Nishihata and John Scott Railton, on threats faced by civil society.

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VB2017 video: Consequences of bad security in health care

Jelena Milosevic, a nurse with a passion for IT security, is uniquely placed to witness poor security practices in the health care sector, and to fully understand the consequences. Today, we publish the recording of a presentation given by Jelena at VB201…
"You are probably asking yourselves what a nurse is doing at a cybersecurity conference. Trust me, my colleagues are even more surprised, because they truly believe that hospitals… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/11/vb2017-video-consequences-bad-security-health-care/

Vulnerabilities play only a tiny role in the security risks that come with mobile phones

Both bad news (all devices were pwnd) and good news (pwning is increasingly difficult) came from the most recent mobile Pwn2Own competition. But the practical security risks that come with using mobile phones have little to do with vulnerabilities.
Last week saw yet another successful edition of Mobile Pwn2Own, the contest in which participants are challenged to attack fully patched mobile devices using previously unknown… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/11/vulnerabilities-play-only-tiny-role-security-risks-come-mobile-phones/

VB2017 paper: The (testing) world turned upside down

At VB2017 in Madrid, industry veteran and ESET Senior Research Fellow David Harley presented a paper on the state of security software testing. Today we publish David's paper in both HTML and PDF format.
Few subjects are as hotly debated within the security community as the testing of security software. Virus Bulletin has been at the core of many of these debates, both as a… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/11/vb2017-paper-testing-world-turned-upside-down/

VB2017 video: Turning Trickbot: decoding an encrypted command-and-control channel

Trickbot, a banking trojan which appeared this year, seems to be a new, more modular, and more extensible malware descendant of the notorious Dyre botnet trojan. At VB2017, Symantec researcher Andrew Brandt presented a walkthrough of a typical Trickbot in…
Trickbot, first reported a year ago by Malwarebytes researcher Jérôme Segura as the successor of Dyre/Dyreza, has become perhaps the most important banking trojan of 2017. It is… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/11/vb2017-video-turning-trickbot-decoding-encrypted-command-and-control-channel/

November

https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/11/

Paper: FAME - Friendly Malware Analysis Framework

Today, we publish a short paper in which CERT Société Générale presents FAME, its open source malware analysis framework.
As someone who spends most of his time talking to people who work for security vendors, I am always impressed by the amount of security research that takes place in the real… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/11/paper-fame-friendly-malware-analysis-framework/

Ebury and Mayhem server malware families still active

Ebury and Mayhem, two families of Linux server malware, about which VB published papers back in 2014, are still active and have received recent updates.
Whether it is to send spam or to redirect web traffic to malicious payloads, compromised (Linux) web servers are the glue in many a malware campaign. Two such networks of… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/10/ebury-and-mayhem-server-malware-families-still-active/

VB2017 paper: Crypton - exposing malware's deepest secrets

Crypton, a tool developed by F5 Networks researchers Julia Karpin and Anna Dorfman, aims to speed up the reverse engineering process by decrypting encrypted content found in a (malicious) binary. The researchers described the tool in a paper which they pr…
Computer scientists are notorious for a specific kind of laziness: the kind of laziness that makes them work really hard in order to avoid some other, often more boring, hard… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/10/vb2017-paper/

VB2017 paper: The sprawling market of consumer spyware

For many people, the threat of an abusive partner or ex-partner is very real - and the market for consumer spyware worryingly large. Today, we publish the recording of a presentation on the subject of consumer spyware given at VB2017 by The Daily Beast re…
Nation states, criminals and bored teenagers are the various kinds of adversaries the security community is used to facing, and they are all well understood. There is one type of… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/10/vb2017-paper-sprawling-market-consumer-spyware/

Gábor Szappanos wins fourth Péter Szőr Award

At the VB2017 gala dinner, the fourth Péter Szőr Award was presented to Sophos researcher Gábor Szappanos for his paper "AKBuilder – the crowdsourced exploit kit".
Every year, during the Virus Bulletin Conference gala dinner, we celebrate the life and works of Péter Szőr, the brilliant security researcher who passed away so sadly in 2013. We… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/10/gabor-szappanos-wins-fourth-peter-szor-award/

VB2017 paper: Walking in your enemy's shadow: when fourth-party collection becomes attribution hell

We publish the VB2017 paper and video by Kaspersky Lab researchers Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade and Costin Raiu, in which they look at fourth-party collection (spies spying on other spies' campaigns) and its implications for attribution.
Of all the possible targets for digital spies, there is one particularly attractive target that doesn't get a lot of attention: that of other espionage campaigns. Yet this kind… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/10/vb2017-paper-walking-your-enemys-shadow-when-fourth-party-collection-becomes-attribution-hell/

Didn't come to VB2017? Tell us why!

Virus Bulletin is a company - and a conference - with a mission: to further the research in and facilitate the fight against digital threats. To help us in this mission, we want to hear from those who didn't come to Madrid. What is your impression of the …
Last week, hundreds of security researchers from around the world gathered in Madrid for VB2017, the 27th Virus Bulletin International Conference. Every year, we… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/10/didnt-come-vb2017-tell-us-why/

Montreal will host VB2018

Last week, we announced the full details of VB2018, which will take place 3-5 October 2018 at the Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth hotel in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Last week, at the end of the very successful 27th Virus Bulletin conference, we announced the location for VB2018, the 28th Virus Bulletin conference, which will take place 3 to 5… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/10/montreal-announced-location-vb2018/

VB2017 preview: Beyond lexical and PDNS (guest blog)

In a special guest blog post, VB2017 Silver sponsor Cisco Umbrella writes about a paper that researchers Dhia Mahjoub and David Rodriguez will present at the conference this Friday.
In this special guest blog post, VB2017 Silver sponsor Cisco Umbrella writes about a paper that researchers Dhia Mahjoub and David Rodriguez will present at the conference this… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/10/vb2017-preview-beyond-lexical-and-pdns-guest-blog/

Avast to present technical details of CCleaner hack at VB2017

The recently discovered malicious CCleaner version has become one of the biggest security stories of 2017. Two researchers from Avast, the company that had recently acquired CCleaner developer Piriform, will share the results of their investigations at VB…
The recently discovered malicious CCleaner version has become one of the biggest security stories of 2017. It is the story of a mysterious attacker who managed to put a backdoor… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/10/avast-present-technical-details-ccleaner-hack-vb2017/

VB2017 preview: Walking in your enemy's shadow: when fourth-party collection becomes attribution hell

We preview the VB2017 paper by Kaspersky Lab researchers Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade and Costin Raiu on fourth-party collection and its implications for attack attribution.
"We heard you like popping boxes, so we popped your box so we can watch while you watch" Two years ago, Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade of Kaspersky Lab's GReAT team gave a… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/10/vb2017-preview-walking-your-enemys-shadow-when-fourth-party-collection-becomes-attribution-hell/

October

https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/10/

VB2017 preview: Offensive malware analysis: dissecting OSX/FruitFly.B via a custom C&C server

We preview Patrick Wardle's VB2017 paper, in which the Synack researcher analyses the mysterious OSX/FruitFly malware by setting up a custom C&C server.
Apart from the odd taxi driver loudly making the claim, the idea that "Macs don't get malware" has become something of the past. Nevertheless, most security researchers focus on… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/09/vb2017-preview-offensive-malware-analysis-dissecting-osxfruitfly-custom-cc-server/

VB2017 - information for press

More than 50 security industry experts will present conference papers to their peers at VB2017 next week, and there are several papers on the programme with a certain newsworthiness. There is still time for cybersecurity journalists to apply for a press p…
Next week, security researchers from around the world will gather in Madrid for VB2017, the 27th International Virus Bulletin Conference. More than 50 security industry experts… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/09/vb2017-information-press/

VB2017 preview: BPH exposed - RBN never left they just adapted and evolved. Did you?

We preview the VB2017 paper by Dhia Mahjoub (OpenDNS) and Jason Passwaters (Intel471) who combine an actor-centric and a network-centric approach to analysing bulletproof hosting operations.
Running a cybercriminal enterprise isn't all that easy. Try, for instance, setting up a site hosting malware and you'll find that sooner or later the provider will suspend your… https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2017/09/vb2017-preview-bph-exposed-rbn-never-left-they-just-adapted-and-evolved-did-you/

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