Bulletin

Throwback Thursday: The Thin Blue Line

In 1994, UK Fraud Squad detectives started making inroads into the most puzzling 'Whodunnit' since the Great Train Robbery. Had an outbreak of computer crime swept Britain? No, it was all part of a police training program.

VB2015 paper: Effectively testing APT defences: defining threats, addressing objections to testing, and suggesting some practical approaches

Simon PG Edwards (Dennis Technology Labs)
Richard Ford (Florida Institute of Technology)
Gabor Szappanos (Sophos)

As targeted attacks gain more attention, and protection developers pay more attention to the implementation of new defensive technologies, the need arises for the testing of product efficacy with respect to this new kind of threat. However, compared…

Throwback Thursday: Peter-II - Three Questions of The Sphinx (July 1993)

How much does a user really need to know in order to defend his computer from computer viruses? In 1993, the latest news from the anti-viral battle-front was that if the user wanted to defend the contents of his computer from viral attack, he should…

VB2015 paper: The ethics and perils of APT research: an unexpected transition into intelligence brokerage

Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade (Kaspersky Lab)

Information security researchers are increasingly finding themselves involved in investigating state-sponsored or geopolitically significant threats. In his VB2015 paper, Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade looks at the perils and ethical conundrums involved…

VB2015 paper: Modelling the Network Behaviour of Malware to Block Malicious Patterns. The Stratosphere Project: A Behavioural IPS

Current malware traffic detection solutions work mostly by using static fingerprints, white and black lists and crowd-sourced threat intelligence analytics. These methods are useful for detecting known malware in real time, but are insufficient…

VB2015 paper: Digital ‘Bian Lian’ (face changing): the Skeleton Key malware

Chun Feng (Microsoft)
Tal Be'ery (Microsoft)
Stewart McIntyre (Dell SecureWorks)

When the Skeleton Key malware is installed on a domain controller, the attacker can play a face-changing trick on the domain by logging in as any user it chooses and performing any number of actions on the system including, but not limited to,…

Throwback Thursday: I say Virus, You say Trojan (January 1998)

In January 1998, VB Technical Editor Jakub Kaminski asked: If trojans seem to be more dangerous than viruses, why don’t anti-virus vendors tackle those too?

VB2015 paper: POS Fraud Trends and Counter-Actions to Mass Fraud

Ken Dunham (iSIGHT Partners)

Point-of-Sale (POS) e-crime fraud was of little discussion until the fall of 2013. Since then, a large number of retail stores in the US have announced major breaches. The number of infected organizations is in the thousands, with credit card…

VB2015 paper: It's A File Infector... It’s Ransomware... It's Virlock

Vlad Craciun (Bitdefender)
Andrei Nacu (Bitdefender)
Mihail Andronic (Bitdefender)

Win32.Virlock, with all its variations, is both a new kind of file infector and a piece of ransomware (screen-locker) at the same time. In this paper, we aim to cover the techniques used by this virus and discuss methods that can be used to detect…

VB2015 paper: Sizing Cybercrime: Incidents and Accidents, Hints and Allegations

Stephen Cobb (ESET)

Cybercrime certainly feels like a major threat to the security of networked systems upon which so much of daily life depends in the world today. Criminals routinely use digital networks to steal data, defraud companies and consumers, and disrupt…