Virus Bulletin - May 2011


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2011-05-01


Comment

A ‘defence triangle’

‘... with the facts laid bare, the cross-border cyber enforcement issues between nations will be discussed differently.' Wout de Natris, De Natris Consult

Wout de Natris - De Natris Consult

News

Crimeware kit released for Mac

Mac users targeted by crimeware kit and fake AV.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

DNS hack

Hackers gain access to server providing DNS for legitimate domains.

Martijn Grooten - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

March 2011

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.


Malware analysis

Putting Trojan.Hashish out to grass

Win32/Unruy.AD conceals its code at a low level and infects the Master Boot Record so that it will be loaded before the operating system (and any security solutions installed by the user) have a chance to kick in. Robert Lipovský and Peter Hlavatý provide all the details.

Robert Lipovský - ESET, Slovakia & Peter Hlavatý - ESET, Slovakia

Technical feature

Flibi: evolution

The Flibi virus demonstrated that a virus can carry its own ‘genetic code’, and if the building blocks of that code are mutated in some way, then interesting behaviours can arise. In this article Peter Ferrie demonstrates how some of Flibi's instructions might be removed by replacing them with functionally equivalent code sequences.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Book review

Zero day: a novel

VB usually reserves book reviews for factual books dedicated to the subject of information security. This month, however, we break away from tradition to review a piece of fiction written by renowned Windows systems internals expert and Microsoft Technical Fellow, Mark Russinovich.

Paul Baccas - Sophos, UK

Product review

Agnitum Outpost Security Suite Free

Free anti-virus continues to be all the rage, with more and more firms jumping on the bandwagon. John Hawes takes a look at one of the latest offerings: the free version of Agnitum’s Outpost Security Suite, and finds that you can get quite a lot for nothing these days.

John Hawes - Virus Bulletin, UK

Comparative review

VBSpam comparative review May 2011

The 13th VBSpam test didn’t prove unlucky for any of the participating products, with all 19 entrants receiving a VBSpam award. Martijn Grooten presents the detailed figures that distinguish the good products from the really good ones, and takes a look at some additional features of the products on test.

Martijn Grooten - Virus Bulletin, UK

Calendar

Anti-malware industry events

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


 

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