Tag Archives: Virus Lab

Pretty women. Which one will infect you?

Malware which opens pictures of attractive women to entice its victims has been around for some time. Last month there were more than usual, so I decided to research malware that pretends to be a regular picture, and the results are pretty interesting. We looked for executable samples with two distinct characteristics: 1. .jpg in […]

Fake Korean bank applications for Android – Pt 3

Recently, we discovered an account on GitHub, a service for software development projects, that has interesting contents. The account contains several projects; one of the latest ones is called Banks, and it has interesting source codes.  The account contains information like user name, photo, and email address, but we cannot tell who the guy in […]

Fake Korean bank applications for Android – part 2

In February, we looked at the first part of the fake Korean bank application analysis along with Android:Tramp (TRAck My Phone malicious Android application), which uses it. In this blogpost, we will look at another two Android malware families which supposedly utilize the same bunch of fake Korean bank applications. At the end of this […]

Fake Korean bank applications for Android – PT 1

About a year ago, we published this analysis about a pharming attack against Korean bank customers. The banks targeted by cybercriminals included NH Bank, Kookmin Bank, Hana Bank, ShinHan Bank, and Woori Bank. With the rise of Android-powered devices, these attacks now occur not only on the Windows platform, but also on the Android platform. […]

Research buzz: Undercover technology

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Question of the week: What is the antivirus setting called DeepScreen? DeepScreen is a new technology inside avast! Antivirus 2014. When you are about to run a suspicious program which is not yet known to the other core antivirus technologies, DeepScreen is invoked. Its task is to simply distinguish between good and bad software. Although it seems […]

Malformed FileZilla FTP client with login stealer

Beware of malformed FileZilla FTP client versions 3.7.3 and 3.5.3. We have noticed an increased presence of these malware versions of famous open source FTP clients. The first suspicious signs are bogus download URLs. As you can see, the installer is mostly hosted on hacked websites with fake content (for example texts and user comments […]

Win32/64:Blackbeard & Pigeon: Stealthiness techniques in 64-bit Windows, Part 2

Last week we promised to explain in detail how the “Blackbeard” Trojan infiltrates and hide itself in a victim’s system, especially on its 64-bit variant. Everything described in this blogpost happens just before Pigeon (clickbot payload) gets downloaded and executed. The most interesting aspects are the way it bypasses the Windows’ User Access Control (UAC) […]

Win32/64:Blackbeard & Pigeon: Stealthiness techniques in 64-bit Windows, Part 1

At the turn of the year we started to observe a Trojan, not much discussed previously (with a brand new final payload). It has many interesting aspects: It possesses a complex structure containing both 32-bit and 64-bit code; it achieves its persistence with highly invasive methods; and it is robust enough to contain various payloads/functionalites. […]

How to clean your hacked OpenX server

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Christmas is a time of peace, but it does not apply to hackers and creators of malware. In the middle of the holidays, the AVAST Virus Lab found a new type of infection targeting advertisement servers with OpenX installed. Unfortunately, the only antivirus detecting this threat is avast! which leads to the erroneous conclusion that […]

Comparison of Adware in Windows and OS X: Linkular and Genieo

By definition, Adware is a program bundle which renders advertisements in order to generate revenue for its author. In a more strict sense, e.g. for security solutions, it means an application/installer whose nature lies somewhere between a potentially unwanted application and proper malware, like Trojans or Spyware. It might use more or less aggressive methods, […]