Papers published in October 2015


Editor: Martijn Grooten

Throwback Thursday: Memetic Mass Mailers: Time to Classify Hoaxes as Malware? (July 2002)

In July 2002, Andrew Lee explained why an effective hoax could be as damaging as a mass-mailed fast-burning virus, and questioned whether we should begin to classify hoaxes as malware.

Andrew Lee - Team Anti-Virus, UK

Throwback Thursday: The Real Virus Problem (December 1993)

Thanks mainly to the marketing efforts of the anti-virus industry around the world, in 1993 the true extent of the computer virus problem has been efficiently concealed beneath a ragbag of pseudo-scientific projections, surveys, reports, forecasts and speculations. In December 1993, Jim Bates presented the findings of a survey of UK computer programmers, conducted without any input from the software vendors.

Jim Bates -

MWI-5: Operation HawkEye

Gabor Szappanos looks at a series of malware campaigns that used Office macros to download the commercial HawkEye keylogger.

Gabor Szappanos - Sophos, Hungary

Throwback Thursday: Misguided or malevolent? New trends in virus writing (February 2004)

Writing in February 2004, Stuart Taylor considers what he believes to be the start of a new trend in virus writing and wonders whether there is truly a criminal element entering virus writing.

Stuart Taylor - Sophos, UK

 

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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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