Virus Bulletin - September 2007


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2007-09-01


Comment

AV is alive and well

'Both the disease and the cure now differ significantly from their original forms.' David Emm, Kaspersky Lab.

David Emm - Kaspersky Lab, UK

News

Unsafe computing in abundance

Reports and statistics on unsafe computing.


Malware prevalence report

July 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.


Feature

The life cycle of bots

Having spent a lot of time thoroughly analysing how bots work – studying the overall bot ‘ecosystem’ as well as the individual files, Luis Corrons has noted that they've achieved a certain level of autonomy, in such a way that they almost have a life of their own. We are still a little way from Skynet, but it is only a matter of time...

Luis Corrons - Panda Security, Spain

Opinion

Friendly whitelisting and other innovations: a response

Chief Security Officer for Bit9, Ian Poynter continues the conversation started last month by Dr Vesselin Bontchev about whitelisting as an endpoint security technology, and explores some of the questions he raised.

Ian Poynter - Bit9 Inc. , USA

Conference report

Viva Las Vegas!

VB sent roving reporters (aka anti-virus miscreants) Andrew Lee and David Perry to the Nevada desert for five days of non-stop hardcore computer security at the Black Hat Briefings and hacker convention DEFCON 15. Andrew Lee reports on Black Hat, and David Perry rounds up the fun and games (and serious business) at DEFCON.

Andrew Lee - ESET , UK & David Perry - Trend Micro, USA

Technical feature

OpenOffice security and viral risk – part one

Eric Filiol and Jean-Paul Fizaine report on the security weaknesses of the OpenOffice suite.

Eric Filiol - Army Signals Academy , France & Jean-Paul Fizaine - Army Signals Academy, France

Product review

BitDefender Total Security 2008

John Hawes takes an in-depth look at BitDefender's latest home-user offering, BitDefender Total Security 2008.

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 - September 2007

Anti-spam news; Fighting spam using tar pits (feature)


 

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…

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