Virus Bulletin - November 2011


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2011-11-01


Comment

Within the margin of error

‘Only 3% of the webmasters responded... Tanase had rediscovered the Bontchev constant.’ Gabor Szappanos, VirusBuster

Gabor Szappanos - VirusBuster, Hungary

News

Spammers link to yet-to-be registered domains

Increase reported in spamvertized URLs using domains that are yet to be registered.

Martijn Grooten - Virus Bulletin, UK

Chemical industry targeted

Symantec reports of targeted attack on companies in the chemical industry.

Martijn Grooten - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

September 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.


Conference report

Viva Barcelona!

Helen Martin reports on a sunny week in Spain at the 21st Virus Bulletin International Conference.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware analyses

Spitmo – SpyEye component for Symbian

Despite the Windows versions of Zeus and SpyEye now sharing source code, Zitmo and Spitmo - the mobile components of each - have nothing in common at the code level. Spitmo was created from scratch solely for the purpose of stealing mTANs. Mikko Suominen has all the details.

Mikko Suominen - F-Secure, Finland

Flibi: reloaded

A new version of the W32/Flibi virus has been released. It now supports assemble-time or compile-time polymorphism during construction of the first generation translator code and its parallels with molecular biology have increased. Peter Ferrie delivers the details.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Features

Investigating the abuse of search engines to promote illicit online pharmacies

Unauthorized online pharmacies that sell prescription drugs without requiring a prescription have been a fixture of the web for many years. By gathering the top web search results for 218 drug-related Internet queries daily over nine months, Tyler Moore and his colleagues have found evidence of substantial manipulation of web search results to promote unauthorized pharmacies.

Tyler Moore - Wellesley College, USA

The art of stealing banking information – form grabbing on fire

Botnets such as Zeus, SpyEye and others use the effective technique of form grabbing to steal sensitive information from victims’ machines. Aditya Sood and his colleagues take a detailed look at the form-grabbing technique.

Aditya K. Sood - Michigan State University, USA, Richard J. Enbody - Michigan State University, USA & Rohit Bansal - SecNiche Security, USA

Comparative review

VBSpam comparative review November 2011

This month's VBSpam test sees 24 products on the test bench (22 full solutions and two blacklists). All full solutions achieved a VBSpam award, but there was more distinction between the products’ performance than in recent tests and some only just reached the certification threshold. 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…

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