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.

IT heavyweights combine forces to fight cyber crime

New security industry consortium formed.

Liar, liar

Lies, damn lies and AV companies.

Fast flux trojan author to plead guilty

Nugache author enters plea bargain.

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.

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.

New memory persistence threats

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

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.

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.

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.

Anti-malware industry events

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

Spam Supplement - July 2008

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