Archives - June 2008

Giving Old Viruses the Boot

Further to my recent post on the venerable (but still out there) Slammer worm, we were asked recently about a real old-timer, a boot-sector infector called Stoned.Angelina. (Oddly enough, I think this was the last BSI reported to me when I was still doing occasional 2nd-line AV support earlier in this decade.) How could such an elderly

Analysis of some Mobile Malware

With the release of ESET’s Mobile Antivirus, a security solution for smart phones, I started asking myself about mobile threats. While there is not as much malicious software attacking mobile platforms as exists in the desktop world, I was able to find some interesting samples to analyze. The following is an analysis of the WinCE/Brador.A

What the Helkern is that?

In my copious free time, I sometimes answer questions on security issues on one of those “Ask the Experts”  pages. It sometimes feels a bit like stepping into a not-quite-parallel universe, where it’s still 2002-3: a strangely high proportion of those queries are about Helkern (the worm most us know as Slammer or SQL Slammer,

Rustock.C – kernel mode protector (short analysis)

In the past few weeks there have been many rumors about Rustock.C: many people have talked how hard it is to process, and many people have also complained about the uselessness of a replicant sample made publicly available (MD5 00430470e6754f082b6c2c19d022caea). Actually, I can definitely say that this sample is… very useful. With deep analysis we

MacMatters

I run (in my copious free time) a page called Mac Virus that I inherited from Susan Lesch, who ran it as a comprehensive Mac antivirus resource. (That page has nothing to do with the later pages at macvirus.org or macvirus.net, by the way, which also refer to themselves as Mac Virus, and recently experienced infestation problems

50 VB100 Awards!

With the June Virus Bulletin test, ESET became the first antivirus company in the world to pass 50 tests for VB100 awards. As consumers I think you should know what the VB100 award means. First of all, a VB100 award does not mean that a product detects 100% of all viruses or malware. The VB