Virus Bulletin - August 2012


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2012-08-01


Comment

IP addresses and privacy-sensitive data: a different point of view

‘[In] the digital realm ... we tread very carefully and avoid reporting [incidents] for fear of divulging sensitive data, i.e. the IP address.' Wout de Natris.

Wout de Natris - De Natris Consult, The Netherlands

News

VB2012: call for last-minute papers

VB is seeking submissions from those wishing to give presentations dealing with up-to-the-minute specialist topics at VB2012.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Researchers discover extent of data collected by iPhone apps

Researchers find that an alarming number of iOS apps access data without the user’s permission.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

June 2012

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 analyses

ZAccess detailed analysis

Recently, we have seen a new trend in ZAccess: less is more. In around March 2012, the aggressive self-defence technique had disappeared from some variants, and in June 2012, the whole rootkit was removed, making it a completely user-mode piece of malware. Neo Tan and Kyle Yang describe the details of the latest versions of ZAccess.

Neo Tan - Fortinet, Canada & Kyle Yang - Fortinet, Canada

Inside the ICE IX bot, descendent of Zeus

Aditya Sood and colleagues present an analysis of ICE IX bot, a descendent of the Zeus bot which demonstrates how one bot can give rise to another.

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

Tussling with Tussie

There are multiple ways to hide the decoder, such as by forcing Windows to apply a relocation delta, or by using obscure instruction side effects. Now, W32/Tussie shows us a way to hide the encoded data. Peter Ferrie has the details.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Feature

Garbage collection

As a form of anti-debugging/anti-emulation, some malicious programs insert garbage code within their instructions. Raul Alvarez looks at the use of garbage code and unsupported or rarely used APIs by recent malware.

Raul Alvarez - Fortinet, Canada

Comparative review

VB100 Comparative review on Windows 7

The latest VB100 test on Windows 7 generally saw better product stability than expected, although a lower pass rate than the last test - one third of products failing to achieve VB100 certification this time. John Hawes has all the details.

John Hawes - Virus Bulletin

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…

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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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