Virus Bulletin - November 2012


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2012-11-01


Comment

The cost of being scared safe

‘The throttling effect of fear on consumer uptake of online shopping and banking is certainly real.' Stephen Cobb, ESET.

Stephen Cobb - ESET, USA

News

Hacker forums provide clues to likely attack techniques

Much to be learned from monitoring hacker forums.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

ZeroAccess infects 2.2 million

2.2 million home networks infected with ZeroAccess worldwide.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Three arrests in phishing case

UK authorities arrest three men in London.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

September 2012

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.


Conference report

Six flags over Texas

The last week of September saw a sizeable portion of the world's anti-malware experts decamp to Dallas. Helen Martin reports on the 22nd Virus Bulletin International Conference.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware analyses

Is our viruses learning?

It’s rare to see a virus advertised as demonstrating machine learning in any form, but W32/Grimgribber does just that. Peter Ferrie has the details.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Ramnit bot

First discovered in around April 2010, Ramnit is now not only a file infector that infects Windows Portable Executable files (.exe, .scr and .dll files) and HTML documents, but also a multi-component bot. Chao Chen takes a deep dive into Ramnit, analysing the functionalities of each of its components.

Chao Chen - Fortinet, China

Dissecting Winlocker – ransomware goes centralized

Winlocker, aka Gimemo, has revolutionized the design of ransomware - all the infected machines are controlled centrally using two C&C panels. Aditya Sood and colleagues discuss the design and behaviour of the Winlocker ransomware.

Aditya K. Sood - Michigan State University, USA, Richard J. Enbody - Michigan State University, USA & Rohit Bansal - Independent security researcher, USA

Feature

Tracking the 2012 Sasfis campaign

Micky Pun unveils all the important nuts and bolts of the latest instalment of the Sasfis botnet by analysing its packers, core payloads and botnet operations.

Micky Pun - Fortinet, Canada

Comparative review

VBSpam comparative review November 2012

This month's VBSpam tests saw an overall increase in spam catch rates, with 15 products earning a VBSpam award and four achieving a VBSpam+ award. Meanwhile, the addition of a corpus of phishing emails demonstrated that products have significantly more difficulty filtering phishing mails than the average spam message. 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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