Bulletin

Hotel group fined

FTC says data breaches occurred as a result of group failing to maintain reasonable security on its networks.

VB welcomes

VB welcomes newest member of the team.

Tiny modularity

Researchers have found a small piece of malware capable of doing just as much as its bigger brothers. Raul Alvarez looks at the structure of the malware, its code injections and modular execution and describes how the tiny ‘Tinba’is capable of doing…

Unpacking x64 PE+ binaries: introduction part 1

Aleksander Czarnowski describes some of the main differences between the PE and PE+ file formats from the perspective of the binary unpacking process.

Malware design strategies for circumventing detection and prevention controls – part two

Aditya Sood and Richard Enbody discuss some of the different techniques that are used by present-day malware to circumvent protection mechanisms.

Automatically detecting spam at the cloud level using text fingerprints

With content-based anti-spam technologies decreasing in efficiency, Marius Tibeica and Adrian Toma propose a fingerprinting algorithm that maps similar text inputs to similar signatures.

Botnets in the browser

‘... attackers can trivially create a botnet that will run on any modern OS, on any personal Internet device, in any location in the world.' Robert McArdle, Trend Micro.

Number of mobile malware samples approaches 10k

McAfee reports a striking increase in the number of malware samples seen since the start of the year.

Malicious attachments peak mid-week

FireEye reports a weekly pattern in the number of malicious email attachments in circulation.

Andromeda botnet

Neo Tan (Fortinet)

The Andromeda botnet recruits its bots thanks to four key elements - compromised websites, an exploit kit, a downloader and a mailing engine - linked by four sequential phases. Neo Tan takes a closer look.