Virus Bulletin - September 2012


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2012-09-01


Comment

Threat prevalence: your breach will have to wait

‘The vendor has no choice but to prioritize resources towards ... keep[ing] up with existing malware families.' Chad Loeven, Silicium Security.

Chad Loeven - Silicium Security

News

Rise in targeted attacks

Security firm reports an almost 400% increase in targeted attacks against companies in the last year.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

UK regulator fines Russian Android malware firm

Russian company fined by UK regulator for distributing apps containing premium rate dialler.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

July 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

‘Lahf’ing all the way

W32/Frilly decodes itself using a subtle side effect of multiple instructions – the state of the CPU flags. Peter Ferrie has all the details.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

URLZone reloaded: new evolution

MIB banking trojan URLZone dates back to 2009, and unlike other botnets it still uses a centralized communication system. Although less flexible than other P2P botnets, its refined method of injection, old-fashioned centralized topology and a low-profile attitude make it very successful. Neo Tan takes an in-depth look.

Neo Tan - Fortinet, Canada

Features

Pinterest scams – under the hood

Having enjoyed exponential growth over the last year, social media site Pinterest has also become a popular target amongst scammers for making money quickly and easily through various scams. Hardik Shah describes some of them.

Hardik Shah - McAfee, USA

A global treaty on online threats (or the challenges of (inter)national cooperation)

Wout de Natris looks at the state of international cooperation on cybercrime and considers the need for a global treaty on online threats.

Wout De Natris - De Natris Consult, The Netherlands

Tutorial

Unpacking x64 PE+ binaries part 2: using WinDbg

In the first part of this tutorial series Aleksander Czarnowski described some fundamental differences between the 32- and 64-bit Windows PE+ file format and looked at using the Bochs IDA plug-in to find the original entry point of a file. In part two, he describes using WinDbg and demonstrates a different approach to the unpacking process.

Aleksander P. Czarnowski - AVET, Poland

Comparative review

VBSpam comparative review September 2012

In this month's VBSpam tests, catch rates improved a little across the board, but products had problems with the introduction of more Asian-language spam. 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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