Virus Bulletin - March 2006


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: Matt Ham

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2006-03-01


Comment

View from the cheap seats

'Our jobs and our day-to-day successes and failures are still as much about people and what they do (and don't do) as they ever were.' Max Morris, independent author, USA.

Max Morris - Independent author, USA

News

Hotbar adware dispute settled

Symantec settles adware case.


Updating niggles

Troublesome month for security vendors.


Malware prevalence report

January 2006

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.


Virus analyses

Proxies for the underworld: I-Worm.Locksky.AS

The Locksky email worm first appeared in October 2005. Its aim is to install proxies on victims' machines, which can then be sold. Ferenc Laszlo Nagy has the details.

Ferenc Laszlo Nagy - VirusBuster, Hungary

IM_a nuisance – W32.Imav.A

Two years after its emergence the Beagle family is still one of the most pervasive families of Internet worms. John Canavan takes a close look at one variant that has made the surprising switch from email to ICQ as its major infection vector.

John Canavan - Symantec Security Response, Ireland

Features

How can a web filter add proactive security?

Steen Pedersen explains how the perimeter defence layer can be enhanced with the use of a web filter.

Steen Pedersen - Equant, Denmark

Improving proactive detection of packed malware

Dynamic translation is a technique that can be used instead of emulation for decrypting complex malware. Adrian Stepan describes how the technique can also be used to perform generic unpacking.

Adrian Stepan - Microsoft, USA

Comparative update

Changes to the VB test sets

VB's product reviewer Matt Ham describes some changes to the test sets used for VB's comparative reviews.

Matt Ham - Virus Bulletin, UK

Technical feature

Solving the metamorphic puzzle

Metamorphic viruses have posed a challenge for the anti-virus industry for quite some time. This article focuses on a number of metamorphic techniques and highlights different methods for detecting them.

Rodelio G. Fiñones - Fortinet Technologies, Canada & Richard Fernandez - Trend Micro, Philippines

Spam Bulletin

Spam Bulletin - March 2006

This month's anti-spam news and Andrej Bratko describes the use of data compression models to fight spam.


 

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

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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!

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