Virus Bulletin - July 2010


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2010-07-01


Comment

The dawn of the ‘rogue AV testers’

‘Some of the new testing labs that have appeared recently mimic the tactics of rogue AV products.’ Costin Raiu, Kaspersky Lab

Costin Raiu - Kaspersky Lab, Romania

News

Sex outnumbered

Study reveals legitimate sites serving malware far outnumber infected adult websites.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Russian malware bounces back

Malware originating from Russia is on the increase again.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Cybercrime case studies used to educate businesses

Autralian anti-money laundering and counter terrorism financing regulator uses case studies to educate businesses about potential risks.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

May 2010

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

Hacking Koobface

The Koobface web server component has vulnerabilities that are remotely exploitable. Joey Costoya discusses the vulnerabilities, and explores the possibility of taking over the Koobface botnet.

Joey Costoya - Trend Micro

Technical feature

Anti-unpacker tricks – part ten

Last year, a series of articles described some tricks that might become common in the future, along with some countermeasures. Now, the series continues with a look at tricks that are specific to debuggers and emulators.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Features

The Indian subcontinent: part II

In 1997, Virus Bulletin published an overview of virus activity in the Indian subcontinent. The piece ended with a series of predictions. Andrew Lee now picks up where that article left off and examines where the predictions were borne out, and where they failed to meet reality.

Andrew Lee - K7 Computing

What’s the deal with sender authentication? Part 2

Sender authentication is a hot topic in the world of email. It has a number of uses and a number of suggested uses. Which ones work in real life? Which ones don’t quite measure up? Can we use authentication to mitigate spoofing? Can we use it to guarantee authenticity? And how do we authenticate email, anyway? Terry Zink provides the answers to these questions and more, this month focusing on SPF.

Terry Zink - Microsoft, USA

Product review

PC Tools Internet Security 2010

Virus Bulletin's lab team take a detailed look at the PC Tools Interenet Security suite and find a solid product, covering the necessary bases thoroughly.

John Hawes - Virus Bulletin, UK

Comparative review

VBSpam comparative review

With 23 full anti-spam solutions on the test bench, this month’s VBSpam comparative review is the largest to date, with a record 22 product achieving certification. Martijn Grooten has the details.

Martijn Grooten - Virus Bulletin, UK

VBSpam erratum

Careful investigation of the results of the VBSpam comparative review brought to light some errors in the calculation of the figures. The revised figures are shown here.


Calendar

Anti-malware industry events

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


 

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…

We have placed cookies on your device in order to improve the functionality of this site, as outlined in our cookies policy. However, you may delete and block all cookies from this site and your use of the site will be unaffected. By continuing to browse this site, you are agreeing to Virus Bulletin's use of data as outlined in our privacy policy.