Virus Bulletin - February 2013


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2013-01-02


Comment

Targeted attacks: what's in store?

‘The general level of insight into network infiltration around the globe is becoming more informed.' Kurt Baumgartner, Kaspersky Lab.

Kurt Baumgartner - Kaspersky Lab

News

VB2014: location, location, location

Details of VB2014 announced.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Results of cybersecurity exercise published

Report finds knowledge of procedures and information flows is crucial.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

December 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.


Malware analyses

A(C)ES high

Intel introduced a new set of CPUs in 2009 that included hardware support for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in the instruction set. These have not attracted much interest from virus writers - until now. Peter Ferrie describes the W32/Brotinn virus.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Please Help!

Raul Alvarez looks into the execution path of malware that resembles a piece of shellcode inside a help file.

Raul Alvarez - Fortinet, Canada

Feature

Techniques for evading automated analysis

Abhishek Singh looks at some of the techniques that are commonly used by malware to bypass analysis in a virtualized environment.

Abhishek Singh - FireEye, USA

Commentaries

Anti-virus: last rites, or rites of passage?

While some are claiming that AV is so far past its best before date that it should only be used when given away free, David Harley asks on what basis this judgement has been made, and whether the reality is that anti-virus is simply no longer the same product as it was decades ago.

David Harley - ESET, UK

Breaking down barriers for cybersecurity: where's the first-mover advantage?

The topic of cybersecurity and international cooperation usually involves difficult discussions about cross border jurisdiction issues, the need for cooperation between very different actors, and privacy. Wout de Natris considers the issues and asks: are there first-mover advantages when it comes to cooperation in cybersecurity? Can a collective action make a difference, and if so what could the first actions be?

Wout de Natris - De Natris Consult, The Netherlands

Comparative review

VB100 comparative review on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11

This month sees the VB test team taking their annual look at anti-malware products for the Linux world. John Hawes has 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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