Category: blog
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Welcome to virusbulletin.com
Virus Bulletin revealed its first website in the spring of 1996, almost 20 years ago. As was common in those days, it was referred to as ‘our presence on the “world wide web”‘ — making me wonder whether millennials even know what www in so many domain names stands for. Thanks to archive.org , we…
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VB2015 video: TurlaSat: The Fault in our Stars
Kurt Baumgartner talks about Turla’s extraplanetary activities. Despite the hype around the subject, the tools used by most so-called APT groups are surprisingly mundane. But there are exceptions. In September 2015, researchers at Kaspersky Lab published research on the Turla APT group (also known as Uroburos or Snake), which hijacked satellite Internet links for command…
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Security vendors should embrace those hunting bugs in their products
Security software is software too — and it will have flaws. Last week, I was interviewed for the Risky Business podcast . I really enjoyed the experience, not just because I’ve long been a fan of the show, but also because we discussed a subject I really care about: the security of security products. If…
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More VB Conference papers and videos published
11 papers and 9 videos added to our website. In the security industry, we’re used to people saying sorry: “sorry we chose a default password of 12345678”; “sorry we didn’t look after your personal data better”; “sorry we didn’t discover this huge vulnerability earlier”; and so on. In that context, my reason for apologising is…
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Throwback Thursday: Peter-II – Three Questions of The Sphinx
This Throwback Thursday, VB heads back to 1993, when an ordinary memory-resident master boot sector virus spiced things up with a bit of pop trivia. Over recent years we have become used to hearing about ransomware extorting money from victims by locking up their devices and demanding a ransom in order for access to the…
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VB2015 paper: Effectively testing APT defences
Simon Edwards discusses how to test the potentially untestable. Like the term or loathe it, APTs have given rise to a new generation of security products that protect against these more targeted and sometimes more advanced threats. Often, such products come with bold claims about how they are able to fend off such threats in…
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VB2015 paper: The ethics and perils of APT research: an unexpected transition into intelligence brokerage
Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade discusses the perils and ethical conundrums that arise as the industry enters a new playing field. Many security researchers have been part of the security community for long enough to remember the days when the typical adversary was a 17-year-old teenager operating from their bedroom. These days, however, some of the adversaries…
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VB2015 paper: Digital ‘Bian Lian’ (face changing): the Skeleton Key malware
Microsoft, Dell SecureWorks researchers analyse malware targeting Active Directory servers. A year ago, researchers from Dell SecureWorks discovered a new kind of malware, dubbed ‘Skeleton Key’, that was used in targeted attacks. The malware, which was installed on the target’s domain controller, allowed the attacker to login as any user and thus perform any number…
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Throwback Thursday: I say Virus, You say Trojan
This Throwback Thursday, VB heads back to 1998 — a time when anti-virus vendors avoided tackling non-replicating trojans, worms, jokes and corrupted files. Today, the idea of security vendors not tackling trojans or other forms of malware seems absurd, yet back in the 90s, anti-virus vendors argued that because, by definition, they developed anti-virus ,…
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Let’s Encrypt certificate used in malversiting
We’d better get used to a world where malicious traffic is encrypted too. According to some people, myself included, Let’s Encrypt was one of the best things that happened to the Internet in 2015. Now that, as of December, the service is in public beta, anyone can register certificates for domains they own, in a…