Category: blog
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Facebook launches platform for sharing of threat intelligence
Twitter, Yahoo! amongst early participants in ‘ThreatExchange’. When I took my first steps in the security industry, I was surprised by just how much information was shared between competitor companies. Both the threat landscape and the industry have changed significantly in the eight years since then, yet a lot of information sharing still goes on…
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VirusTotal project aims to remediate false positives
Security vendors to receive alerts when legitimate files are detected as malicious. False positives are a huge problem for the IT industry in general and for security products in particular. Indeed, in our VB100 and VBSpam comparative tests, many otherwise well performing products have failed to achieve an award because they blocked too many legitimate…
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VB2014 paper: P0wned by a barcode: stealing money from offline users
Fabio Assolini explains how cybercriminals are targeting boletos. Since the close of the VB2014 conference in Seattle in October, we have been sharing VB2014 conference papers as well as video recordings of the presentations. Today, we have added ‘P0wned by a barcode: stealing money from offline users’ by Kaspersky Lab researcher Fabio Assolini. If you…
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Adobe issues patch for yet another Flash Player zero-day
CVE-2015-0313 used in the wild as long ago as December. Adobe has just issued an out-of-band patch for its Flash Player to fix a zero-day vulnerability that is actively being exploited in the wild. You may be forgiven for thinking you had already patched this two weeks ago when Flash Player version 16.0.0.287 fixed CVE-2015-0310…
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VB2014 paper: We know it before you do: predicting malicious domains
Wei Xu and his colleagues attempt to block domains before they’re used for bad purposes. Since the close of the VB2014 conference in Seattle in October, we have been sharing VB2014 conference papers as well as video recordings of the presentations. Today, we have added ‘We know it before you do: predicting malicious domains’ by…
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Praise for the unsung heroes of email
Many decent performances in VB’s latest comparative spam filter test. A decade ago, there were optimists who thought that the spam problem would soon be eradicated. At the same time, pessimists thought that spam would quickly become such a big problem that we’d all stop using email. The bad news is that the optimists were…
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Low VirusTotal detection rates for new malware, do they matter?
It is not as important as is often suggested — and doesn’t mean the malware is allowed to execute. It is fairly common these days for security researchers to write about new malware attacks and point to low anti-virus detection rates when the affected sample is uploaded to VirusTotal ‘s multi-AV scanning service. But do…
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‘RansomWeb’ ransomware targets companies’ databases
Encryption first added as a patch, key only removed when all backups are encrypted. Make backups, they said. Then you won’t have to worry about ransomware, they said. Ransomware has quickly become one of the most frustrating kinds of cyber attack. We all know that our devices could suddenly die, and if this leads to…
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From roadie to security rock star: it can happen
To break into security, start by getting a job in the industry. You don’t have to be a regular reader of this blog to know that computer security is very important in our increasingly connected world. Unsurprisingly, this has its effect on the job market for security professionals – where there are many vacancies, and…
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Frequently asked questions about VB2015 conference submissions
No, it doesn’t have to be about malware and no, it doesn’t have to be deeply technical either! Last month, we opened the call for papers for VB2015 , the 25th Virus Bulletin conference, which takes place 30 September to 2 October in Prague, Czech Republic. We’ve had some excellent presentations at the VB conference…