Category: blog
-
VB2015 paper: DDoS Trojan: A Malicious Concept that Conquered the ELF Format
Recently, a new trend has emerged in non- Windows DDoS attacks. Malware has evolved into complex and relatively sophisticated pieces of code, employing compression, advanced encryption and even rootkit capabilities. Machines running systems supporting the ELF format are targeted – meaning that anything from desktops and servers to IoT devices such as routers or digital…
-
Throwback Thursday: Hyppönen, that Data Fellow / Finnish Sprayer
This week, well known and universally respected industry guru Mikko Hyppönen celebrates his 25th anniversary of working at F-Secure (formerly known as Data Fellows ). In recognition of this milestone, VB takes a look back in the archives at two articles published in 1994: an “insight” into the life and work of the then rising…
-
Throwback Thursday: Hyppönen, that Data Fellow / Finnish Sprayer
This week, well known and universally respected industry guru Mikko Hyppönen celebrates his 25th anniversary of working at F-Secure (formerly known as Data Fellows ). In recognition of this milestone, VB takes a look back in the archives at two articles published in 1994: an “insight” into the life and work of the then rising…
-
VB2015 paper: Economic Sanctions on Malware
Financial pressure can be a proactive and potentially very effective tool in making our computer ecosystems safer: making attackers spend real money before they can deploy malware is an effective deterrent. In his VB2015 paper, Igor Muttik analyses and gives examples of technologies (certificates, credentials, etc.) that can be used to de-incentivize bad behaviours in…
-
VB2015 paper: Economic Sanctions on Malware
Financial pressure can be a proactive and potentially very effective tool in making our computer ecosystems safer: making attackers spend real money before they can deploy malware is an effective deterrent. In his VB2015 paper, Igor Muttik analyses and gives examples of technologies (certificates, credentials, etc.) that can be used to de-incentivize bad behaviours in…
-
Virus Bulletin’s job site for recruiters and job seekers
Security is doing well. Not necessarily the security of your personal devices, corporate networks and critical infrastructure, but as an area to work in, IT security seems to be a pretty good choice right now. Indeed, according to some experts there will be one million job vacancies in IT security this year. Opportunities To help…
-
Throwback Thursday: One_Half: The Lieutenant Commander?
The recently encountered Petya trojan comes as something of a blast from the past: it infects the Master Boot Record (MBR) and encrypts the Master File Table (MFT). Kaspersky Lab ‘s Fedor Sinitsyn has a good description of the trojan in a blog post , in which he points out that, far from being anything new,…
-
Advertisements on Blogspot sites lead to support scam
In our research for the VBWeb tests, in which we measure the ability of security products to block malicious web traffic, we recently noticed some sites hosted on Google ‘s Blogspot service that presented the user with a warning about a malware error and a telephone number which they were urged to call in order…
-
To make Tor work better on the web, we need to be honest about it
If you regularly browse the web through the Tor network, you will have noticed that many websites are either inaccessible, or have strong barriers (in the form of difficult CAPTCHAs) put in front of them. In a blog post , ‘The Trouble with Tor’, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince, whose company is responsible for many of…
-
Paper: How It Works: Steganography Hides Malware in Image Files
Sometimes a picture says more than a thousand words. And sometimes in computer security, a picture contains a thousand words, or rather a lot of commands, used by malware authors to remotely control the malware. This is an example of a technique known as ‘steganography’: hiding data in such a way that it is invisible…