Within the margin of error

‘Only 3% of the webmasters responded... Tanase had rediscovered the Bontchev constant.’ Gabor Szappanos, VirusBuster

Spammers link to yet-to-be registered domains

Increase reported in spamvertized URLs using domains that are yet to be registered.

Chemical industry targeted

Symantec reports of targeted attack on companies in the chemical industry.

September 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.

Viva Barcelona!

Helen Martin reports on a sunny week in Spain at the 21st Virus Bulletin International Conference.

Spitmo – SpyEye component for Symbian

Despite the Windows versions of Zeus and SpyEye now sharing source code, Zitmo and Spitmo - the mobile components of each - have nothing in common at the code level. Spitmo was created from scratch solely for the purpose of stealing mTANs. Mikko Suominen has all the details.

Flibi: reloaded

A new version of the W32/Flibi virus has been released. It now supports assemble-time or compile-time polymorphism during construction of the first generation translator code and its parallels with molecular biology have increased. Peter Ferrie delivers the details.

Investigating the abuse of search engines to promote illicit online pharmacies

Unauthorized online pharmacies that sell prescription drugs without requiring a prescription have been a fixture of the web for many years. By gathering the top web search results for 218 drug-related Internet queries daily over nine months, Tyler Moore and his colleagues have found evidence of substantial manipulation of web search results to promote unauthorized pharmacies.

The art of stealing banking information – form grabbing on fire

Botnets such as Zeus, SpyEye and others use the effective technique of form grabbing to steal sensitive information from victims’ machines. Aditya Sood and his colleagues take a detailed look at the form-grabbing technique.

VBSpam comparative review November 2011

This month's VBSpam test sees 24 products on the test bench (22 full solutions and two blacklists). All full solutions achieved a VBSpam award, but there was more distinction between the products’ performance than in recent tests and some only just reached the certification threshold. Martijn Grooten has the details

Anti-malware industry events

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