Virus Bulletin - January 2013


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2012-13-01


Comment

Ransomware for fun and profit

‘The people behind these scams are making significant amounts of money, and they are infecting users all over the world.’ David Jacoby, Kaspersky Lab

David Jacoby - Kaspersky Lab, Sweden

News

Call for papers: VB2013 Berlin

Calling all speakers: submissions now being accepted for VB2013 Berlin.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Dutch disclosure guidelines

Dutch government attempts to encourage responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

November 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

Talk to you later

Thousands of unsuspecting chat users clicked on a malicious link a few months ago. A spam message contained a link that led to a worm being downloaded, which, in turn, downloaded a component that sent more copies of the spam message. Variously dubbed ‘Phopifas’, ‘Dorkbot’ and ‘Rodpicom’, Raul Alvarez looks into the detail of the malicious executable that sent the spam messages.

Raul Alvarez - Fortinet, Canada

Surf's up

The 010 Editor is a powerful tool for analysing files. The editor can also alter files, and it supports a scripting language to automate certain tasks. Who would have guessed that one of those tasks would be to infect files? Peter Ferrie describes how {W32/1SC}/Toobin demonstrates a case of 'when tools attack'.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Tutorial

Shellcoding ARM

With recent studies reporting a dramatic increase in the usage of mobile devices, a decrease in sales of PCs and notebooks, and ‘BYOD’ being the hot trend of the moment, it is no longer possible to ignore non-x86 architectures. Aleksander Czarnowski provides a basic starting point for understanding how to write shellcode on ARM based CPUs.

Aleksander P. Czarnowski - AVET Information and Network Security, Poland

Features

Writing a static unpacker for XPXAXCXK

Sebastian Eschweiler describes a static unpacker for the 'XPACK' packer - outlining each step of the unpacking process and looking at how weaknesses in vital steps can efficiently be exploited to produce a generic unpacker.

Sebastian Eschweiler - Fraunhofer FKIE, Germany

A change in the toolkit/exploit kit landscape

Recently, there has been a change in the toolkit/exploit kit landscape, with bad guys dedicating more time and resources to securing their creations and the servers on which their software will be installed. Loucif Kharouni explains why we need to adapt and adjust our ways of working to keep up with these changes.

Loucif Kharouni - Trend Micro, USA

Comparative review

VBSpam comparative review January 2013

No fewer than ten of the 21 complete solutions tested this month achieved a VBSpam+ award by blocking at least 99.5% of the spam from the test stream, while not blocking any of the 9,000+ legitimate emails. This month's test also saw the first product to correctly identify every one of the 74,240 emails in the test corpus. 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.


 

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