Academic excellence rewarded

2012-04-01

Helen Martin

Virus Bulletin, UK

Editor: Helen Martin

Abstract

UK intelligence agency recognizes eight centres of excellence in cyber security research.

Eight UK universities have each been given a cash injection of £50,000 and awarded ‘Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research’ status by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

The institutions recognized by GCHQ were: the University of Bristol, Imperial College London, Lancaster University, the University of Oxford, Queen’s University Belfast, Royal Holloway, the University of Southampton and University College London.

The Centres of Excellence are set to run for a period of five years – during which time GCHQ will encourage other universities to develop their capabilities in the area of cybercrime research. It is hoped that this will considerably strengthen the UK’s cyber research community and attract the best academics and research students both in the UK and from overseas

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…

Bulletin Archive