US crime-fighters closed in on a gang behind a huge botnet after taking control of the criminals’ servers. The authorities issued their own commands, effectively ordering the malware to shut down. They also logged the IP addresses of compromised machines.
BBC news wrote about it, as ESET’s David Harley in the article Coreflood Reduced to a Backwater.
Latest PowerPoint security patch has problems
On its recent patch day, Microsoft released security updates to fix vulnerabilities in multiple versions of its Office products. The patch for PowerPoint 2003 can, however, have negative consequences – after installation existing presentations may be unable to be opened or may cause an error message stating that the file is corrupted and cannot be fully displayed. See full article on H Security.
KB2506014 kills TDL4 on x64
Not so long ago, Microsoft released a security patch addressing the way Windows x64 operating systems check integrity of the loaded modules. In our recent report (The Evolution of TDL4: Conquering x64) we described a method used by the TDL4 bootkit to load its malicious unsigned driver on 64-bit systems, even though those systems have an enforced kernel-mode code signing policy. The new security update is intended to fix the “feature” (vulnerability) in x64 OS’s (Windows Vista and later) exploited by TDL4. More in ESET Blog.
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