Virus Bulletin - August 2013


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2013-08-01


Comment

The dying art of computer viruses

‘I had a sneaking regard for the graphical payloads some of the virus writers were building into their creations.' Graham Cluley.

Graham Cluley - Independent commentator, UK

News

VB2013 call for last-minute papers

VB2013, Berlin: seeking last-minute presentations dealing with up-to-the-minute specialist topics.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Tax breaks for beefing up security?

US mulls idea of offering financial benefits for businesses who super charge their digital defences.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

UK losing war against cybercrime

MPs feel Britain is too complacent about the war against Internet crime.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

June 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

Andromeda 2.7 features

A new version of the Andromeda bot was recently spotted in the wild with strengthened self-defence mechanisms and novel methods for keeping its process hidden and running persistently. Moreover, its communication data structure and encryption scheme have changed, rendering previous Andromeda IPS/IDS signatures useless. Suweera De Souza and Neo Tan take a detailed look at Andromeda 2.7.

Suweera De Souza - Fortinet, Canada & Neo Tan - Fortinet, Canada

The ZeroAccess money-generating campaign

ZeroAccess has evolved steadily in recent years, taking control of millions of compromised computers around the world. Chao Chen and Kyle Yang take a look at three of the ways in which it generates income: browser redirection, click fraud and Bitcoin mining.

Chao Chen - Fortinet, China & Kyle Yang - Fortinet, Canada

Features

The clean theory

Can the principles of logic be applied to the daily task of file analysis? Mircea Ciubotariu gives it a go.

Mircea Ciubotariu - Symantec Security Response, USA

BadNews reveals ongoing challenges in the Android marketplace

The Android threat BadNews has been spreading through both Google Play and other app download sites, affecting 30 or more apps and with an estimated two to nine million devices having downloaded the affected apps. John Foremost looks at the ongoing challenge of securing the Android marketplace.

John Foremost - Independent researcher, USA

Spotlight

Greetz from academe: Masters of their own domains

In the latest of his 'Greetz from Academe' series, highlighting some of the work going on in academic circles, John Aycock looks at malware detection using NX responses.

John Aycock - University of Calgary, Canada

Comparative review

VB100 comparative review on Windows 7 Pro

A higher than usual pass rate was offset by a large number of problems with the products this month, with many tests having to be re-run or nursed gently through as scanners and logging facilities proved unreliable at best. 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…

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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