Virus Bulletin - October 2012


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2012-10-10


Comment

Is AV the old dog?

‘Anti-virus does a very good job, but ... missing once is seen as failure in general.' Greg Day, Symantec.

Greg Day - Symantec, UK

News

VGrep: the rose revived

VB relaunches VGrep tool.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

EU’s biggest cyber test a success

European banks, information security agencies and governments participate in Europe’s biggest cyber security test.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

August 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

Cridex botnet preview

Carmen Liang and Neo Tan focus on a detailed analysis of the Cridex banking trojan's injection routine, communication protocol, encryption scheme and working mechanism in order to shed light on the development path of the three most recent generations of Cridex bots.

Carmen Liang - Fortinet, Canada & Neo Tan - Fortinet, Canada

Filename: BUGGY.COD.E

Raul Alvarez takes a close look at a recently discovered piece of malware that infects documents and executable files at the same time.

Raul Alvarez - Fortinet, Canada

Features

Inside a Black Hole: Part 1

The most actively deployed exploit kit over the past year has without doubt been the Blackhole exploit kit. Gabor Szappanos attempts to fill in the (black)holes in our knowledge about this threat. In this article he covers how the server-side code can be analysed.

Gabor Szappanos - Sophos, Hungary

Code injection via return-oriented programming

Code injection first became popular in game cheats, where it was used to change the program’s course of execution. Wayne Low looks at a piece of malware that takes advantage of the Windows messages flaw to perform code injection.

Wayne Low - F-Secure, Finland

Tutorial

Unpacking x64 PE+ binaries part 3: IDA, graphs and binary instrumentation

In the first two parts of this tutorial series Aleksander Czarnowski has demonstrated some useful manual tricks that are helpful in unpacking x64 binaries. In this third article he describes one more manual unpacking approach then moves on to some scripting examples.

Aleksander P. Czarnowski - AVET, Poland

Book reviews

Trojan Horse

Paul Baccas reviews Mark Russinovich's latest malware-themed thriller, Trojan Horse.

Paul Baccas - Sophos, UK

Operation Desolation

Paul Baccas reviews a short story by Windows systems internals expert and Microsoft Technical Fellow, Mark Russinovich: Operation Desolation.

Paul Baccas - Sophos, UK

Comparative review

VB100 Comparative review on Windows Server 2003 R2

John Hawes reports the results of the latest VB100 test on Windows Server 2003 - while the pass rate was around normal (20 passes and 10 fails), stability still proved to be an issue for many products.

John Hawes - Virus Bulletin

Calendar

Anti-malware industry events

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


 

Latest articles:

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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

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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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