Virus Bulletin - September 2009


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2009-09-01


Comment

How clean is clean?

'If ever there was an argument to be made against a whitelisting-only approach to security, this is it.' Roel Schouwenberg, Kaspersky Lab.

Roel Schouwenberg - Kaspersky Lab

News

MAAWG takes steps to tackle bots

Working group issues best practices documents for ISPs.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Apple patches iphone

Patch released for critical SMS vulnerability.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

July 2009

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

Heads or tails?

Peter Ferrie reports on a virus that uses an interesting variation on cavity infection.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Feature

Data tainting for malware analysis – part one

The increased use of virtualization technologies presents new angles for new types of attack. Florent Marceau presents a different view of this technical evolution in order to take advantage of full virtualization with the aim of helping malware researchers.

Florent Marceau - CERT-LEXSI, France

Conference report

Black Hat 2009 conference report

Andrew Lee reports from Caesar's Palace on the mammoth 15-track Black Hat conference.

Andrew Lee - K7 Computing

Product review

G Data Total Security 2010

VB's test team decided to test drive G Data's latest complete suite product and were thoroughly impressed with the breadth and quality of the product.

John Hawes - Virus Bulletin, UK

Comparative review

Anti-spam comparative review September 2009

The latest round of VBSpam testing and certification sees an increase in the field of competitors for the third time in a row. This month, 12 products line up on the test bench. Martijn Grooten has the details.

Martijn Grooten - Virus Bulletin, UK

Calendar

Anti-malware industry events

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


 

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…

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