Virus Bulletin - July 2008


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2008-07-01


Comment

A commitment to quality and reliability

'The purpose of the VB100 is to provide a regular measure of the competence, reliability and credibility of software vendors in the security field.' John Hawes, Virus Bulletin.

John Hawes - Virus Bulletin, UK

News

IT heavyweights combine forces to fight cyber crime

New security industry consortium formed.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Liar, liar

Lies, damn lies and AV companies.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Fast flux trojan author to plead guilty

Nugache author enters plea bargain.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

May 2008

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 analysis

The road less truvelled: W32/Truvel

By the addition of a relocation table, Vista executables can be configured to use a dynamic image base. That essentially turns them into executable DLLs. Now a virus has come along that has made a ‘breakthrough’ by infecting these executables - or it would be a breakthrough if it weren’t for the fact that relocatable executables have been supported since Windows 2000. Peter Ferrie takes an indepth look at the buggy W32/Truvel.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Features

New memory persistence threats

Eric Filiol describes a set of computer memory weaknesses that could enable the theft of sensitive data via malware attacks.

Eric Filiol - ESAT, France

Reversing Python modules

The object-oriented programming language Python can be used for many kinds of software development – potentially including malware development. Aleksander Czarnowski believes in being prepared and here he provides a brief overview of how to reverse engineer a Python module.

Aleksander Czarnowski - AVET INS, Poland

Advertising database poisoning

Adware programs have variously been dressed up as providing anti-phishing protection, intrusion detection capabilities as well as the ‘benefit’ of targeted advertising, but their presence is still a considerable nuisance to many. Here, Lysa Myers looks into the dubious world of Internet advertising and looks at the effects of programs such as AntiPhorm on adware in general.

Lysa Myers - McAfee, USA

Product review

Sunbelt Software VIPRE Antivirus + Antispyware

John Hawes gets his hands on a beta copy of Sunbelt's VIPRE - a genuinely new anti-malware product emerging from the anti-spyware boom.

John Hawes - Virus Bulletin, UK

Calendar

Anti-malware industry events

Must-attend events in the anti-malware industry - dates, locations and further details.


Spam Bulletin

Spam Supplement - July 2008

Anti-spam news; Spear phishing - on the rise? (comment)


 

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…

We have placed cookies on your device in order to improve the functionality of this site, as outlined in our cookies policy. However, you may delete and block all cookies from this site and your use of the site will be unaffected. By continuing to browse this site, you are agreeing to Virus Bulletin's use of data as outlined in our privacy policy.