Virus Bulletin - June 2009


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2009-06-01


Comment

Malware without a name is still malware

'At the rate malware is currently released ... it may be that the specific naming of malware is a dead concept.' Lysa Myers, West Coast Labs.

Lysa Myers - West Coast Labs, USA

News

Obama pledges security education from boardroom to classroom

President Obama announces multi-billion-dollar cybersecurity effort.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Beware of searching for lyrics

McAfee research identifies riskiest Internet search terms.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

April 2009

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.


Technical feature

Anti-unpacker tricks – part seven

New anti-unpacking tricks continue to be developed as the older ones are constantly being defeated. In this series of articles Peter Ferrie describes some tricks that might become common in the future, along with some countermeasures. This article concentrates on anti-debugging tricks that target a number of popular debuggers, as well as some anti-emulating and anti-intercepting tricks.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Conference reports

CARO mio, AMTSO mon amour

David Harley reports on two important industry gatherings that achieved the magic combination of social networking, the exchange of solid information, great entertainment and a beautiful setting: the CARO workshop and the latest AMTSO meeting.

David Harley - ESET

EICAR 2009 in a nutshell: ich bin ein EICARer

Testing, science fiction, a security legend and some magic - Eddy Willems describes the highlights of a sunny week in Berlin at the 19th EICAR conference.

Eddy Willems - Kaspersky Lab & EICAR, Belgium

Comparative review

VB100 on Windows 2003 Server x64

This month's comparative review tackles the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 - with the platform bringing out quite a number of quirks and oddities in several of the products under test. John Hawes presents a round up of the results including the latest RAP testing data.

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 Supplement - June 2009

Anti-spam news; Where is Waledac? (spambot case study)


 

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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