Virus Bulletin - March 2011


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2011-03-01


Comment

What next for rogue AVs?

'The issue facing even the most experienced users is how to distinguish between fake and legitimate antivirus solutions before installing them on a computer.' Dmitry Bestuzhev, Kaspersky Lab

Dmitry Bestuzhev - Kaspersky Lab, Russia

News

China starts to clean up its act

China slides down the rankings of top spam-producing countries.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Messaging anti-abuse award

MAAWG introduces memorial award to honour the behind-the-scenes contributors who make the Internet safer for all.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Hackers hacked

Russian cybercrime forum gets taste of its own medicine.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

January 2011

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

Flibi night

Drawing on some parallels with molecular biology, the W32/Flibi virus attempts to evolve new behaviours in order to evade detection. Peter Ferrie has the details.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Technical feature

Defeating mTANs for profit – part one

Until recently, malware on mobile devices had not been used for organized crime involving large amounts of money. This changed when the infamous Zeus gang, known for targeting online banking, started to show a clear interest in infecting mobile phones and released a new version of their bot to propagate a trojan for mobile phones. Axelle Apvrille and Kyle Yang present an indepth analysis of the Zitmo trojan.

Axelle Apvrille - Fortinet, France & Kyle Yang - Fortinet, Canada

Feature

Canada’s new anti-spam law

With the passage of bill C-28 in December, Canada became the last of the G-8 countries to make spamming illegal. John Levine, who was involved in the development of the bill, outlines the new law and its implications.

John Levine - Taughannock Networks, USA

Book review

A nice drop of Cocoa

Mac security in general attracts a lot of attention these days, and with this in mind David Harley reviews a book that aims to help Mac developers build security into their apps from the beginning of the development process.

David Harley - Mac Virus, UK

Comparative review

VBSpam comparative review March 2011

In this month's VBSpam test 18 out of 19 full solutions achieved VBSpam certification. Martijn Grooten has 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.


 

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.