Virus Bulletin - March 2013


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2013-01-03


Comment

Yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems

‘The collection of detailed statistics, their interpretation and analysis, combined with the desire to improve society, resolved many of the problems of the industrial revolution. The same approaches can be used today to end the high-risk work practices that leak data, to drive the adoption of best practices, and to provide the justification for investments in better security.’ Martin Lee, Symantec.

Martin Lee - Symantec, UK

News

Australia signs cybercrime treaty

Australia becomes latest country to sign the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Cybersecurity centre for Arab region launched

Oman hosts region's cybersecurity hub.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Convicted cybercriminal hacks prison's computer systems

Epic fail as convicted hacker enrolls in IT class for inmates.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

January 2013

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

The evolution of Zortob

Zortob didn't make big headlines when it first appeared a little over a year ago, but a new generation of the malware hitting the lab's honeypots prompted Dong Xie to take a closer look.

Dong Xie - Fortinet, China

It’s mental static!

We have seen viruses with binary components, viruses with script components, and viruses with binary components that drop script components. Now comes a virus whose binary component executes its script component directly in memory by using a binary interface, instead of dropping the script component first. Peter Ferrie has the details.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Feature

What are browser exploit kits up to? A look into Sweet Orange and ProPack

Blackhole has been the major player in the exploit kit market for a while now, but the Sweet Orange and ProPack kits have recently entered the market and are rapidly gaining in popularity. Aditya Sood and colleagues take a look at advancements in the design of the new kits on the block.

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

Tutorial

Shellcoding ARM: part 2

In the first part of this series Aleksander Czarnowski covered the background information needed to understand the principles of ARM shellcoding. In this follow-up article he moves on to dissect some previously crafted shellcode.

Aleksander P. Czarnowski - AVET Information and Network Security, Poland

Comparative review

VBSpam comparative review March 2013

While 17 out of 19 complete anti‑spam solutions performed well enough to earn a VBSpam award, 15 of them missed more spam than they did in the last test. 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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