Virus Bulletin - October 2006


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

Consulting Editor: Ian Whalley, Nick FitzGerald, Richard Ford, Edward Wilding

2006-10-01


Comment

DDoS: the rise from obscurity

'The cost of a DDoS attack can be substantial – they can last hours, weeks and even months, and are capable of bringing unprotected organizations to a grinding halt.' Danny McPherson, Arbor Networks.

Danny McPherson - Arbor Networks, UK

News

News round-up

September's goings on in the AV industry.


Malware prevalence report

August 2006

The Virus Bulletin prevalence table is compiled monthly from virus reports received by Virus Bulletin; both directly, and from other companies who pass on their statistics.


Analysis

Chamber of horrors

W32/Chamb is the first virus to infect compiled HTML (CHM) files parasitically. Peter Ferrie has the details.

Peter Ferrie - Symantec Security Response, USA

Opinion

AV Testing SANS virus creation

David Harley writes to the director of research at the SANS Institute to express his concerns about Consumer Reports' AV testing methodology.

David Harley - Independent researcher, author and consultant, UK

Feature

Scanning embedded objects in Word XML files

Christoph Alme looks at the embedding of arbitrary objects into Word 2003 XML files and shows why finding them and passing them onto the virus scanner is not such a 'walk in the park' as one might expect.

Christoph Alme - Secure Computing Corporation, Germany

Comparative review

VB Comparative: Windows 2000 Server - October 2006

John Hawes serves up another VB comparative - this month, he puts 26 AV products through their paces on Windows 2000 Server and finds 18 of them worthy of a VB 100%.

John Hawes - Virus Bulletin

Spam Bulletin

Spam Bulletin - October 2006

Anti-spam news; AISK - a different approach (feature)


 

Latest articles:

Nexus Android banking botnet – compromising C&C panels and dissecting mobile AppInjects

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Cryptojacking on the fly: TeamTNT using NVIDIA drivers to mine cryptocurrency

TeamTNT is known for attacking insecure and vulnerable Kubernetes deployments in order to infiltrate organizations’ dedicated environments and transform them into attack launchpads. In this article Aditya Sood presents a new module introduced by…

Collector-stealer: a Russian origin credential and information extractor

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Fighting Fire with Fire

In 1989, Joe Wells encountered his first virus: Jerusalem. He disassembled the virus, and from that moment onward, was intrigued by the properties of these small pieces of self-replicating code. Joe Wells was an expert on computer viruses, was partly…

Run your malicious VBA macros anywhere!

Kurt Natvig wanted to understand whether it’s possible to recompile VBA macros to another language, which could then easily be ‘run’ on any gateway, thus revealing a sample’s true nature in a safe manner. In this article he explains how he recompiled…

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