Virus Bulletin - June 2013


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2013-06-03


Comment

Password sweepstakes

‘Capturing the imagination of end‑users when it comes to security education is one of the greatest hurdles.' Helen Martin, Virus Bulletin

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

News

You can't stop the music

Researchers show malware on a mobile device can be triggered by music.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Nations invest in cyber defence

New 'cyber army' for Indonesia and CERT for Jamaica.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

April 2013

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

Chat and paste

SKAgent, a simple, unencrypted, unsophisticated piece of malware, sends spam messages via Skype. Raul Alvarez describes the simple copy-and-paste technique it uses to do so.

Raul Alvarez - Fortinet, Canada

MultiPlatform Madness!

A cross-infector of unrelated platforms is typically implemented as two viruses stuck together, because that’s the easiest way to do it - but if the general mechanics of file enumeration and infection are the same across the affected platforms, then a virus can implement an abstraction layer and expose APIs that each of the routines can call to perform essential functions. {W32/Linux/OSX}/Clapzok does just that - Peter Ferrie has the details.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Spotlight

Greetz from academe: Content-Agnostic Malware Protection

There is often a disconnect between academic security research and anti-malware industry research – in both directions. Dr John Aycock, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, embarks on a new regular feature in which each month he will pick some of the work going on in academic circles and summarize the key points. This month: Content-Agnostic Malware Protection.

John Aycock - University of Calgary, Canada

Features

Java: setting security manager to null

Thanks to its widespread use in legitimate applications, Java has seen a lot of use in malware and exploit kits recently, with one of the most common exploit techniques being to disable the Java security manager. Abhishek Singh and Shray Kapoor present the logic used by malware authors to set the security manager to null.

Abhishek Singh - FireEye, USA & Shray Kapoor - FireEye, USA

Bitcoin mining: Investing in the future of the underground market

The exchange rate of the digital currency Bitcoin (BTC) passed the US$200/BTC1 mark earlier this year – a fact that has not escaped the attention of cybercriminals. Micky Pun takes a look at one of the latest Bitcoin-mining malware families.

Micky Pun - Fortinet, Canada

Comparative review

VB100 comparative review on Windows Server 2012

The VB100 test team pays its first visit to the Windows Server 2012 platform - and finds things generally rather slow and awkward, with a disappointing number of products displaying stability issues. 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

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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

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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