Malware Detection Team

The Malware Detection Team has changed its name to Security Research

Security Research is the core technical security group within Norman R&D, focusing on innovative detection techniques and methodologies. Security Research deals with everything from vulnerability and malware research to development of the Norman Engine and Sandbox. The team is based in Norway with additional locations in the U.S. and India which consists of experts from ten nations with backgrounds in government, academia and commercial entities.

Latest Posts in Malware Detection Team

Malware Detection Team is now Security Research

Please update all URLs from malware-detection-team to security-research.

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The Syrian spyware

In an article yesterday, CNN mentions two malicious programs used to target the Syrian opposition; one which displays message about downloading a free security program, and one which showed no action when executed. We have seen more of these. Most of the ones we’ve seen come as selfextracting RAR executables … Read More

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LessNet: Revisiting the Nobelpeaceprize.org Intrusion

October 26th, 2010 the homepage of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee was compromized with a 0-day exploit designed for Mozilla Firefox. The Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor discovered this, and notified NorCERT and us. How the Nobel site was compromized is not known. However, the details around the installed malware … Read More

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Classic malicious URLs

In my last blog, I wrote about a malware download center that only served malicious executables if the related exploit kit seemed to be successful. The URLs used were so classically malicious that I just have to use them as examples to explain some easy ways to identify them. hxxp://epartyonfloor.ru:8801/html/yveveqduclirb1.php … Read More

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Tracking your Exploitation

A broad range of security researchers are constantly tracking malware download centers (MDC). These centers feed to malicious executables, like bots, trojans, and so on to exploited computers. In the same way as other researchers, we at Norman are tracking MDCs in order to check out the latest executables for … Read More

Tracking Zeus Variants

A recent FBI warning mentions a new strain of the Zeus banking trojan called GameOver. As with previous variants, the malware’s primary target is banking credentials. According to a Swiss researcher, one of the distinguishing features in this variant is a new peer-to-peer (P2P) communication system. Rather than using dynamically … Read More

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Signed malware: Snooping on Chinese students?

Between the holidays I found a very simple but digitally signed malcode. It basically does one single thing: It overwrites the hosts file. The modification is as follows: 175.41.21.11 www.chsi.com.cn The hosts file modification has the effect of overriding any DNS queries for chsi.com.cn so that it points to a … Read More

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Palebot trojan harvests Palestinian online credentials

I sometimes sample the stream of files that come from VirusTotal, so as not to lose touch with what malware is actually floating around. Of special interest are the files where few or only we have detection, because there is a higher probability that such files are false positives that … Read More

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Invisible YNK, a Code Signing Conundrum

This story starts with a compromized code signing certificate. It belongs to YNK Japan Inc, a subsidiary of YNK Korea. YNK makes online games such as “R.O.H.A.N : Blood Feud” and “Seal Online : Eternal Destiny”. The certificate has the following data: Serial Number: 046931BF57EBC5947D3DC4EE7A236E Common Name: YNK JAPAN Inc … Read More

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The Nitro attacks and W32/Odivy

Odivy is a family of backdoor trojans, reportedly used in attacks against the chemical industry, the so-called Nitro attacks. Most of the ones mentioned in this attack are structured as WinRAR  selfextracting (SFX) archives, typically containing two files; one executable and one data file with a *.TXT extension. This may … Read More

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