Virus Bulletin - January 2011


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2011-01-01


Comment

How do we make bigger better?

‘Whilst bigger may not always be better, it is clearly always bigger. And bigness begets bigness.’ Paul Ducklin, Sophos

Paul Ducklin - Sophos, Australia

News

Mobile users more vulnerable to phishing

Mobile users reach phishing sites quicker than non-mobile users and more likely to enter personal details.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

‘Cyber army’ formed in Estonia

Volunteer force of programmers, computer scientists and software engineers established.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

November 2010

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

Carberp, a new bag of tricks

As in normal business, one of most effective ways for a banker trojan to gain market share is to do things better than its competitors, and if possible, make the migration from competitors to its own business as easy as possible. Carberp does both of these things very successfully. Toni Koivunen has all the details of this rising star in the banker trojan scene.

Toni Koivunen - F-Secure, Finland

Feature

What’s the deal with sender authentication? Part 6

Which sender authentication techniques work in real life? Which ones don’t quite measure up? Can we use authentication to mitigate spoofing? Can we use it to guarantee authenticity? And how do we authenticate email, anyway? Terry Zink concludes his series of articles with a look at Author Domain Signing Policies.

Terry Zink - Microsoft, USA

Opinion

Transitions: welcome to the new old world

Andrew Lee takes stock of the anti-malware industry and the world at large as we stand on the cusp of a new decade.

Andrew Lee - Independent researcher, UK

Anecdote

'Hello, I'm from Windows and I'm here to help you'

Craig Johnston relates a tale of unsolicited phone calls, interesting conversations and a worrying (anti-)malware-related scam.

Craig Johnston - Cybercrime researcher, Australia

Call for papers

VB2011 Barcelona

Virus Bulletin is seeking submissions from those who would like to present at VB2011 in Barcelona.


Product review

eScan Internet Security 11

VB's lab team take a closer look at eScan Internet Security 11, commenting on its funky styling and the wealth of features it has to offer.

John Hawes - Virus Bulletin, UK

Comparative review

VBSpam comparative review January 2011

19 full solutions and one partial solution were put to the test in the VBSpam lab this month. 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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