Virus Bulletin - November 2009


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2009-11-01


Comment

Happy holidays: mobile maliciousness

'Social engineering threats are a notable concern for mobile device users and are always escalated during the holiday period.' Ken Dunham, iSIGHT Partners.

Ken Dunham - iSIGHT Partners, USA

News

Nigeria takes steps to clean up its act

Nigerian government clamps down on advance fee fraud.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Facebook wins against ‘Spam King’ Wallace

Social networking giant awarded damages against Sanford Wallace.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

September 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.


Malware analysis

Prescription medicine

W32/Zekneol appears to be a complicated virus, but in his full analysis Peter Ferrie shows that looks can be deceiving.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Features

Data tainting for malware analysis – part two

In this three-part series Florent Marceau studies the use and advantages of full virtualization in the security field. Following an introduction to full virtualization in part one, this part looks at the limitations of the technology.

Florent Marceau - CERT-LEXSI, France

Detecting bootkits

Alisa Shevchenko and Dmitry Oleksiuk decided to find out whether anti-virus software has learned to cope successfully with Mebroot and MBR infectors in general a few years after the first appearance of this type of malware.

Alisa Shevchenko - eSage Lab, Russia & Dmitry Oleksiuk - eSage Lab, Russia

Collaborative spam filtering with the hashing trick

Josh Attenberg and colleagues describe the hashing trick as an effective method for collaborative spam filtering.

Josh Attenberg - Polytechnic Institute of NYU, USA, Kilian Weinberger - Yahoo! Research, USA, Alex Smola - Yahoo! Research, USA, Anirban Dasgupta - Yahoo! Research, USA & Martin Zinkevich - Yahoo! Research, USA

Product review

Microsoft Security Essentials

Microsoft Security Essentials, the long-awaited replacement for the Windows Live OneCare package, is finally with us. VB's test team put Microsoft's new free home-user package through its paces, declaring it to be pretty decent overall.

John Hawes - Virus Bulletin, UK

Comparative review

Anti-spam comparative review

This month’s anti-spam comparative review saw another increase in the field of competitors with 14 products taking their place on the test bench. Martijn Grooten has all the details.

Martijn Grooten - Virus Bulletin, UK

Calendar

Anti-malware industry events

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


 

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