Author Archives: John Barrett
Spy Eye and Carberp — the new banker trojans offensive
The common way for a “wanna-be” hacker to fulfill his sick aspirations is to achieve a known trojan — there is a plenty on the Internet, sometimes they are called RATs(Remote Administration Tools) and use a crypter for the trojan executable file in an attempt to deceive the antiviruses scanning engines based on files signatures. In the same idea, of using the simpliest approach that does not require too much programming work, the vast majority of crypters are coded in Visual Basic 6, the most accesible programming language ever. Still very dangerous by the features they have as : injects code into legitimate processes, bypass firewalls by using reverse connections, …
Trojan Bohu, the first attack against the cloud antivirus system
When it appears for the first time in 2009, the concept of an antivirus software using the cloud computing, seemed to be like a magical powerful solution for all the computers users concerned by their computer security. In a cloud based antivirus, a good part of files processing job is transferred to the server, resulting a light computer resources usage and theoretically a better protection when an user are facing with a new zero-day threat, the scanning services running on the server find the best solution to protect the user against it, and automatically that new threat “signature” is available to all the users from the cloud, including the disinfection …
AdSocks RAT — about the new Java trojan computer viruses
The programs that run on our computers are, from the point of view of their code content, of two main types : compiled and interpreted. The compiled programs are those who suffer a transformation from source code written by the programmer to machine code which consists of instructions that can be directly executed by the computer CPU, that’s why sometimes is called native code. This transformation is done via a compiler. Programs coded in C, C++, Delphi, Pascal for example, are compiled programs and due to their native code produced by the compilers, have the fastest execution speed. Interpreted programs also called scripts, requires the presence of an interpreter installed …
Patriot NG, a new security tool?
Today I’ve tested a less known security tool, Patriot NG 1.1 from www.security-projects.com. Maybe the program is less known because it’s in spanish, not translated yet in english, though all the options and settings are very easy to understand for a native english speaker. The program resides in the system tray, from where you can get access to its main options via context menu-right click. The Control Panel named in spanish “Panel De Control” is very simple and intuitive : As you already guess, the program is watching for alteration all the sensitive area of your Windows system, alerting the user when a program try to make a new connection …
The shortcut virus
Did you ever wonder how powerful is a shortcut ? Or if the computer viruses can be spreaded via shortcuts ? No, this article is not about viruses who are playing with shortcuts on your desktop, making them to run away when you want to click one of them and driving you crazy, this article is about simple shortcuts. For example somebody send you via email as attachment or you download from somewhere a folder with two files in it, a text file and a shortcut to the text file, what are you thinking ? I mean, something like this : The first impulse is to double click the file …
An questionable Task Manager
Always I have a feeling of safety when a computer program ask for my authorization to update itself and absolutely always I have a deception and I’m concerning when I log some connections made by a program without my knowledge. It does not matter the purposes of these “hidden” connections or of some supposed “hidden” processes, in my opinion, all of the actions invisible to the user performed by a program are a potential threat, a potentially violation of the user privacy and in any case an abuse against the user. All of the people feel comfortable in their house when they know all what is happening there and in digital …
7 zip for Windows 7
7z is a new and open architecture archive format developed by Igor Pavlov and based on LZMA compression algorithm. Both LZMA and the utility for handling 7z archives, 7-Zip utility are released under GNU LGPL license which mean is free for commercial or personal use on any computer. A few of the most important features of 7z format are: High compression ratio Strong AES-256 encryption Open architecture Unicode file names Supporting files with sizes up to 16000000000 GB The utility created for handling 7z archives, 7-Zip is an open source software created aswell by Igor Pavlov assuring a high compression ratio for processed files and supporting many archive formats: Packing …
