Virus Bulletin - September 2008


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2008-09-01


Comment

Does the punishment fit the crime?

'Once bitten does not, it seems, make twice shy for spammers.’ Helen Martin, Virus Bulletin.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

News

Advance diary dates: VB2009

VB2009 dates and location announced.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

McAfee sued for web warnings

Disgruntled website owners call SiteAdvisor labelling into question.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

July 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.


Malware analyses

Prophet and loss

Peter Ferrie begins a series of analyses of viruses contained in the long-delayed (and probably last of its kind) EOF-rRlf-DoomRiderz virus zine.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

All your MP3s are belong to us

Christoph Alme and his colleagues walk through the complete attack process of the Win32.ASF-Hijacker.A trojan, which has two different sets of victims: those affected by the trojan itself and those affected by media files altered by the trojan.

Christoph Alme - Secure Computing, Germany, Micha Pekrul - Secure Computing, Germany & Dennis Elser - Secure Computing, Germany

Call for last-minute papers - VB2008

VB2008 Ottawa – Call for last-minute papers

VB seeks submissions for last-minute tech 'turbo' talks at VB2008 in Ottawa.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Book review

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo

Paul Baccas summarises the good, the bad and the ugly within Jakobsson and Ramzan's 'Crimeware: Understanding New Attacks and Defenses'.

Paul Baccas - Sophos, UK

Opinion

Malware teaching considered harmful?

Richard Ford and William Allen, both teachers of malware courses at Florida Institute of Technology, present their views on the teaching of virus writing as part of security courses.

Richard Ford - Florida Institute of Technology, USA & William H. Allen - Florida Institute of Technology, USA

Product review

Lavasoft Ad-Aware 2008

Having started up focusing on unwanted tracking behaviour, Lavasoft's Ad-Aware has gradually branched out to cover adware, spyware and now with the integration of a full anti-malware engine, the gamut of trojans, viruses and worms, with a selection of extras thrown in for good measure. John Hawes reports on how the product has developed to face the multi-pronged malware dangers of the modern age.

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 - September 2008

Anti-spam news; The problem of backscatter - part 1 (feature)


 

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.