Virus Bulletin - January 2008


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2008-01-01


Comment

A richer, but more dangerous web

'The accessing of media-rich, collaborative sites by employees is already cause for concern in terms of both employee productivity and security.' Mark Murtagh, Websense.

Mark Murtagh - Websense, USA

News

Guidelines issued for UK hacker tool ban

Government issues guidelines in response to lobbying.


Malware prevalence report

November 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.


Features

Botnet monitoring

Despite the best efforts of the IT security industry it looks like the malicious bot is here to stay. Andrei Gherman looks at how botnet monitoring can provide information about bots as well as helping to keep the threat under control.

Andrei Gherman - Avira, Germany

Rule-driven malware identification and classification

Over the last few years anti-virus researchers have faced an increasing volume of malware samples arriving at their research labs on a daily basis. Víctor Álvarez presents a simple, rule-driven approach to malware identification and classification that complements the manual work of the malware researcher by compensating for the weaknesses of the human brain.

Víctor M. Álvarez - PandaLabs, Spain

Inside rogue Flash ads

As malicious web ads become increasingly common, Dennis Elser and Micha Pekrul take a close look at a Flash advertising banner belonging to the SWF.AdHijack family.

Dennis Elser - Secure Computing, Germany & Micha Pekrul - Secure Computing, Germany

Call for papers

VB2008 Ottawa

Calling all speakers.


Product review

Agnitum Outpost Security Suite Pro 2008

John Hawes discovers how firewall expert Agnitum has fared having added malware detection to its Outpost Security Suite product.

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 - January 2008

Anti-spam news; 2007: the year of the social engineer? (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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