Virus Bulletin - May 2007


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2007-05-01


Comment

Securing the Web 2.0

'I believe that if the human factor is such a significant part of the problem, then it must also form part of the solution.' David Emm, Kaspersky Lab.

David Emm - Kaspersky Lab, UK

News

A new generation of Panda

Panda sells majority shareholding.


Websense snaps up SurfControl

$400m for British web-filtering company.


VB100 procedure review

Test procedures clarified.


Erratum: VB100 Linux comparative

Dr.Web results corrected.


Malware prevalence report

March 2007

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.


Analyses

ANI-hilate this week

The time between the announcement and exploitation of vulnerabilities continues to shrink - especially in the case of stack overflow vulnerabilities, which require very little skill to exploit. Peter Ferrie describes a prime example: the recent ANI vulnerability and its exploits.

Peter Ferrie - Symantec Security Response, USA

Beyond Virtu(e) and evil

While not technically a new virus (being modelled on the almost ancient Tenrobot family), W32/Virtu does introduce some interesting changes and new techniques. Víctor Álvarez and Mario Ballano describe this polymorphic file infector that also behaves as an IRC bot.

Víctor M. Álvarez - PandaLabs, Spain & Mario Ballano - PandaLabs, Spain

Nirbot: targeted attacks get personal

Nirbot gains its notoriety primarily from the cat fight in which its author has been engaged. Although keenly aware of the descriptions and blog entries posted about his creations, the author seems not to be so well versed on the naming conventions used within the AV industry. Lysa Myers shares the details of this technologically unremarkable, yet reasonably successful bot.

Lysa Myers - McAfee, USA

Feature

Covert zombie ops

Can a botmaster send commands covertly to a botnet of over a million zombies and control them in real time? John Aycock considers how such a botmaster’s command channel might look.

John Aycock - University of Calgary, Canada

Product review

Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security 2007

John Hawes shares his experiences with Trend Micro's PC-cillin Internet Security suite.

John Hawes - Virus Bulletin, UK

Calendar

Anti-malware industry events

Must-attend events in the anti-malware industry - dates, locations and further details.


Spam Bulletin

Spam Bulletin - May 2007

Anti-spam news; MIT Spam Conference 2007 (conference report)


 

Latest articles:

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

Aditya Sood & Rohit Bansal provide details of a security vulnerability in the Nexus Android botnet C&C panel that was exploited to compromise the C&C panel in order to gather threat intelligence, and present a model of mobile AppInjects.

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

Collector-stealer, a piece of malware of Russian origin, is heavily used on the Internet to exfiltrate sensitive data from end-user systems and store it in its C&C panels. In this article, researchers Aditya K Sood and Rohit Chaturvedi present a 360…

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…

We have placed cookies on your device in order to improve the functionality of this site, as outlined in our cookies policy. However, you may delete and block all cookies from this site and your use of the site will be unaffected. By continuing to browse this site, you are agreeing to Virus Bulletin's use of data as outlined in our privacy policy.