Virus Bulletin - July 2011


Editor: Helen Martin

Technical Consultant: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2011-07-01


Comment

Tumblr attacks – what to watch out for

‘Tumblr is definitely a hot property for scammers, and users should be very careful.' Christopher Boyd, GFI Software.

Christopher Boyd - GFI Software

News

Anti-phishing feature for Gmail

Gmail users get helping hand in avoiding phishing scams.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Spam levels take a nose dive

Spamming losing its attraction for criminal operators?

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware prevalence report

May 2011

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

Toll fraud: SipPhreak

PHP/SipPhreak.A acts like an ancient SMTP open relay scanner, but with a twist: it targets open or vulnerable SIP devices instead of mail servers. Alexis Dorais-Joncas gives a detailed analysis of this threat - which is probably the initial step in a broader toll fraud scheme.

Alexis Dorais-Joncas - ESET, Canada

SpyEye malware infection framework

The SpyEye bot has a sophisticated, modular design and has improved its capabilities over time. In this article, Aditya Sood and colleagues examine SpyEye’s modules and map out how they are initialized and how they interact with each other, providing an insight into the design and methods of the bot, and into an effective instance of modern malware.

Aditya K Sood - Michigan State University, USA, Richard J Enbody - Michigan State University, USA & Rohit Bansal - SecNiche Security, USA

Technical feature

Reversing Python objects

As Python has gained popularity with malware writers, new bytecode obfuscation techniques have started to appear. Aleksander Czarnowski describes some of those techniques.

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

Feature

Not so random

Pseudorandom generators are increasingly becoming an integral component of modern malware. Raul Alvarez shows how Conficker uses a pseudorandom generator to produce random domain names while retaining its ability to communicate with the Command and Control (C&C) server.

Raul Alvarez - Fortinet, Canada

Comparative review - updated 1 Aug

VBSpam comparative review July 2011

The 14th VBSpam test showed both a number of excellent performances as well as some that leave room for improvement. Martijn Grooten has all 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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