Virus Bulletin - September 2013


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2013-09-02


Comment

Is cybersecurity by fiat DOA?

‘Government-sponsored efforts to improve cybersecurity are underway ... but will they accomplish their goals?' Stephen Cobb, ESET.

Stephen Cobb - ESET, USA

News

UK gets Cyber Academy

UK's information security skills receive a boost.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Taiwan gets free malware database

Public malware database launched in a bid to help boost cybersecurity.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Syria seeks ethical hackers

Conflict-ridden nation seeks security experts.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

July 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

Styx exploit pack: insidious design analysis

Aditya Sood and colleagues discuss the details and design of the Styx exploit pack.

Aditya K. Sood - Michigan State University, USA, Richard J. Enbody - Michigan State University, USA & Rohit Bansal - Independent security researcher, India

Fans like Pro, too

All kinds of amazing things can be done in JavaScript, especially when the size is constrained. However, when you take size-optimization techniques, combine them with structure and variable-name obfuscations and cram in every malicious action that comes to mind, then you end up with something that looks like JS/Proslikefan. Peter Ferrie has the details.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Nedsym spamming

Despite recent declines, spam still accounts for more than 70% of all email sent. Why does this happen? He Xu exposes the tip of the iceberg by analysing a recent spambot which is driven by the Andromeda botnet: Win32/Nedsym.G.

He Xu - Fortinet, Canada

Spotlight

Greetz from academe: On motivation

In the latest of his 'Greetz from Academe' series, highlighting some of the work going on in academic circles, John Aycock looks at academic focus on hackers.

John Aycock - University of Calgary, Canada

Comparative review

VBSpam comparative review September 2013

In this month's VBSpam test, all but one of the 18 full solutions tested achieved a VBSpam award and five of them stepped things up a notch to earn a VBSpam+ award. 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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