Virus Bulletin - April 2011


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2011-04-01


Comment

IE 6 – 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1

‘...the outlook is alarming when you consider the browser’s local prevalence in China, which peaks at 34.5%.' Gabor Szappanos, VirusBuster

Gabor Szappanos - VirusBuster, Hungary

News

No mail for Alisons, Alberts, Algernons...

McAfee glitch prevents addresses starting with the letter 'A' from receiving mail.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Old breach rears its head

Two years on, stolen card details from Heartland breach still being used.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

February 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.


Technical features

Defeating mTANs for profit – part two

Until recently, malware on mobile devices had not been used for organized crime involving large amounts of money. This changed when the infamous Zeus gang, known for targeting online banking, started to show a clear interest in infecting mobile phones and released a new version of their bot to propagate a trojan for mobile phones. Axelle Apvrille and Kyle Yang present an in-depth analysis of the Zitmo trojan.

Axelle Apvrille - Fortinet, France & Kyle Yang - Fortinet, Canada

Hiding in plain sight

Raul Alvarez takes a look at a lesser known stealth technology - the alternate data stream.

Raul Alvarez - Fortinet, Canada

Conference reports

Phighting cybercrime together

Martijn Grooten presents a round-up of the first annual APWG eCrime Researchers Sync-Up.

Martijn Grooten - Virus Bulletin, UK

RSA 2011 conference review

Jeannette Jarvis presents a round-up of the 20th annual RSA Conference.

Jeannette Jarvis - Independent researcher, USA

Feature

Sender authentication – practical implementations

Previously Terry Zink has looked at how SMTP works, email headers, SPF, SenderID and DKIM. But what about some practical realities? How well do these technologies work in real life? Can we use them to solve actual problems? Here he describes a real case in which SPF and SenderID were combined to solve a problem.

Terry Zink - Microsoft, USA

Comparative review

VB100 comparative review on Windows XP SP3

With a staggering 69 products on this month's VB100 test bench, the VB lab team hoped to see plenty of reliability and stability. But, while the majority of products were well behaved, the team was woefully disappointed by a handful of unruly participants. John Hawes has all the details.

John Hawes - Virus Bulletin

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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