Bulletin

Hotel group fined

FTC says data breaches occurred as a result of group failing to maintain reasonable security on its networks.

VB welcomes

VB welcomes newest member of the team.

Tiny modularity

Researchers have found a small piece of malware capable of doing just as much as its bigger brothers. Raul Alvarez looks at the structure of the malware, its code injections and modular execution and describes how the tiny ‘Tinba’is capable of doing…

Unpacking x64 PE+ binaries: introduction part 1

Aleksander Czarnowski describes some of the main differences between the PE and PE+ file formats from the perspective of the binary unpacking process.

Malware design strategies for circumventing detection and prevention controls – part two

Aditya Sood and Richard Enbody discuss some of the different techniques that are used by present-day malware to circumvent protection mechanisms.

Malicious attachments peak mid-week

FireEye reports a weekly pattern in the number of malicious email attachments in circulation.

Andromeda botnet

Neo Tan (Fortinet)

The Andromeda botnet recruits its bots thanks to four key elements - compromised websites, an exploit kit, a downloader and a mailing engine - linked by four sequential phases. Neo Tan takes a closer look.

EICAR 2012

Eddy Willems presents a roundup of this year's EICAR conference in Portugal.

Understanding the domains involved in malicious activity on Facebook

Recent years have been marked by an explosive growth of social networks, with Facebook becoming one of the most attractive channels for cybercriminal activity. Alin Damian analyses some of the malicious domains extracted from Facebook applications…

So, enter stage right

Some virus writers try to find obscure side effects of instructions in an attempt to confuse virus analysts. Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes we already know about the side effects. The latter is the case with the technique used in the…