Virus Bulletin - May 2010


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2010-05-01


Comment

The best of...

‘[The security industry] has made great strides in attempting to get information across to the general populace in a palatable format..’ Helen Martin, Virus Bulletin

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

News

Acquisitions, sales and rumours

Symantec makes purchases, Sophos sells majority interest and rumours rumble about McAfee.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Cyber Security Challenge challenged by vulnerability

XSS vulnerability in site of project aimed at plugging cyber security skills gap.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

March 2010

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 feature

Anti-unpacker tricks – part eight

Last year, a series of articles described some tricks that might become common in the future, along with some countermeasures. Now, the series continues with a look at tricks that are specific to debuggers and emulators.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Features

TDSS infections – quarterly report

The TDSS/TDL rootkit is the cause of many a headache for anti-virus vendors. Here, Alisa Shevchenko presents a report and analysis of statistics collected from the users of a TDSS removal tool during the first quarter of 2010.

Alisa Shevchenko - eSage Lab, Russia

Adapting to TxF

Abhijit Kulkarni and Prakash Jagdale discuss why most real-time anti-virus scanners are ineffective at detecting malware written using the TxF facility and propose a working solution for the problem.

Abhijit P. Kulkarni - Quick Heal Technologies, India & Prakash D. Jagdale - Quick Heal Technologies, India

Tutorial

Exploit kit explosion – part two: vectors of attack

After introducing a multitude of exploit frameworks used in drive-by browser-based attacks in his last article, this month Mark Davis details the functionality of frameworks, focusing on attack vectors (exploits) and counter-intelligence efforts.

Mark Davis -

Comparative review

VBSpam comparative review

On the first anniversary of the VBSpam comparative review VB's team tested a record 20 full anti-spam solutions, together with one reputation blacklist. The number of VBSpam awards earned also reached a record high of 18. 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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