Virus Bulletin - December 2007


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2007-12-01


Comment

A year of threats across several technologies

'The main trend I have observed this year has been the spread of malware activity across several forms of technology and applications.' Eddy Willems.

Eddy Willems - EICAR, Belgium

News

Yuletide greetings

Festive wishes.


Vista fails to reassure web users

50% of users don't believe Vista has made the Internet any safer.


Botnets roasting on an open fire

FBI reports successes of operation Bot Roast; McAfee predicts cyber espionage for 2008.


Malware prevalence report

October 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.


Call for papers

VB2008 Ottawa

Calling all speakers.


Analysis

Something smells fishy

The author of MSIL/Yakizake claimed that ‘very few implementations of multi-platform malware exist up until now'. Peter Ferrie lists a dozen multi-platform viruses and explains why Yakizake does not qualify for the category.

Peter Ferrie - Symantec, USA

Features

Exploring the evolutionary patterns of Tibs-packed executables

Rachit Mathur and Aditya Kapoor present an analysis of the techniques used by the Tibs packer and describes the reasons for its prolonged effectiveness.

Rachit Mathur - McAfee, USA & Aditya Kapoor - McAfee, USA

Exepacker blacklisting part 2

In the second installment of this three-part series on exepacker blacklisting, Robert Neumann provides a more detailed look at the different types of blacklisting and describes the tools that are available for analysis.

Robert Neumann - VirusBuster, Hungary

Blow up your video

These days we are used to seeing interactive multimedia content on websites - but unfortunately it is possible for these file formats to contain more than one might expect. Christoph Alme and Dennis Elser present a round-up of recent multimedia vulnerabilities.

Christoph Alme - Secure Computing, Germany & Dennis Elser - Secure Computing, Germany

Comparative review

VB comparative review: Windows 2000 Professional

Fewer than half the products submitted for this VB100 review on Windows 2000 made the grade - largely thanks to some pesky polymorphic file infectors and a rash of false positives. John Hawes has all the details.

John Hawes - Virus Bulletin

Calendar

Anti-malware industry events

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


Spam Bulletin

Spam Bulletin - December 2007

Anti-spam news; Spam and the digital divide (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

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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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