John McDonald's blog

A colleague of mine recently wrote about one of the June “Microsoft Tuesday” vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild. Because we're a bit like that, we decided to allow the exploit to compromise one of our honeypot computers so we could observe what happened.

Our friends at Microsoft recently blogged about a new variant of a bootkit Trojan from the family they call Popureb. The variant, Win32/Popureb.E, introduced a driver component to prevent a malicious master boot record (MBR) and other malicious components from being cleaned.

Recap

If you missed Parts I and II of this blog series, you can find them here and here. I finished Part II promising to reveal the organization behind this sorry saga.
 

Recap

Introduction

Email hoaxes are nothing new, dating back at least as far as 1994 with what is widely believed to have been the first email hoax—referred to as the "Goodtimes virus" or the "Goodtimes virus hoax" after the subject of the email.

Almost a year has passed since we last blogged about a new undocumented vulnerability in JustSystems’ Ichitaro software and along with the ever stunning new pink and white blossoms of spring, 2010’s first offering has surfaced. As we have reported on several occasions over the years (see below) Ichitaro is a popular word processing program in Japan.

Theft

It's only been a couple of short weeks since the iPhone background-changing incident that took the world by storm (well, parts of Australia at least), but already a Dutch ISP has reported what would be the first malicious iPhone worm to be seen in the wild.

There has been a flurry of news articles over the past few days on what the media appears to have labeled the Mariposa botnet, after the name a Canadian information security firm used for this particular threat. The ‘butterfly’ in the title of this article refers to the fact that the threat is believed to stem from the Butterfly bot kit, which is no longer for sale.