Virus Bulletin - May 2014


Editor: Helen Martin

Editor: Martijn Grooten

Chief of Operations: John Hawes

Technical Editor: Morton Swimmer

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

2014-05-01


Comment

A grown-up industry

‘We plan to increase our scope further and look even more at other areas of IT security.’ Martijn Grooten

Martijn Grooten - Virus Bulletin, UK

News

Decrease in number of breaches; increase in cost of breaches

Annual Information Security Breaches survey reveals a decrease in the number of breaches but an increase in the average cost of breaches.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Q1 breach data revealed

Number of data records stolen in Q1 2014 sees a 233% increase over the same period last year.

Helen Martin - Virus Bulletin, UK

Malware analyses

Neurevt botnet: new generation

Neurevt first appeared over a year ago – its many components cover a large number of the most popular malicious functionalities, including downloading malware, DDoS attacks and website sniffing. He Xu discusses the major changes that have been introduced into the most recent generation of the botnet.

He Xu - Fortinet, Canada

Anatomy of Turla exploits

Elevation of privilege (EoP) vulnerabilities can allow a program to run arbitrary code, regardless of that program’s current permission level – as a result, they draw a lot of attention from malware authors. Wayne Low describes two of the EoP vulnerabilities exploited by the Turla malware family.

Wayne Low - F-Secure, Finland

The curse of Necurs, part 2

In the first part of his series on the Necurs rootkit, Peter Ferrie looked at what it does during start-up and when it is not loaded as a boot-time driver. This time, he looks at what Necurs does when it is loaded as a boot-time driver.

Peter Ferrie - Microsoft, USA

Feature

On cyber investigations. Case study: a money transfer system robbery

The current information landscape is pretty lacking when it comes to information about cyber investigations. Most reports on cybercrime cover only the results of an investigation, omitting the process, the investigative techniques and the specific attack scenarios. Alisa Esage uses a real‑world example to shed some light on the typical cyber investigation process.

Alisa Esage - Esage Lab, Russia

Spotlight

Greetz from academe: film at eleven

In the latest of his ‘Greetz from Academe’ series, highlighting some of the work going on in academic circles, John Aycock looks at PREC: practical root exploit containment for Android devices.

John Aycock - University of Calgary, Canada

Comparative review

VBSpam comparative review May 2014

For the first time in a year and a half, all 15 of the full anti-spam solutions in this month's VBSpam test achieved a VBSpam award, with six of them earning a VBSpam+ award. 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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