Gates closed at CastleCops

2009-01-01

Helen Martin

Virus Bulletin, UK

Editor: Helen Martin

Abstract

Volunteer-run security operation closes its doors.

After nearly seven years of fighting cybercrime, volunteer-run and much respected security operation CastleCops closed its doors last month.

Established in 2002, the work undertaken by CastleCops included the investigation of malware and phishing scams, malicious site take-downs and security training programs. The organization forged close ties both with the anti-malware community and with law enforcement agencies. CastleCops suffered its share of denial of service attacks and defamation attempts over its close-to-seven-year history, but it seems likely that the lack of a new leader following Microsoft’s hiring of founder Paul Laudanski in June 2008 was one of the contributing factors to the closure of the group.

An announcement on the CastleCops website reads: ‘It has been our pleasure to investigate online crime and volunteer with our virtual family to assist with your computer needs and make the Internet a safer place. Unfortunately, all things come to an end.’

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…

Bulletin Archive