VMRay Blog

Stay current on the threat landscape with industry-leading cybersecurity insights!

Cybersecurity Product Features

2016-05-03

VMRay Analyzer 1.10 is here: STIX/CybOX, SIEM, PowerShell & more

We’ve just released V 1.10 and we’re well on the way to building the ultimate Panopticon for malware. To reach that goal with automated malware analysis and detection, three criteria must be met: The analyzer must scale The analyzer must avoid detection & evasion by the malware being analyzed The

Cybersecurity Malware Analysis

2016-05-02

7ev3n-HONE$T –Ransomware for the rest of us

The ransomware 7ev3n-HONE$T is a new version of an existing ransomware, 7ev3n, with a twist – a much lower ransom fee. Early this year, as reported in January by Graham Cluley, BleepingComputer and others, the original 7ev3n ransomware was spotted in the wild encrypting victims‘ files on Windows machines and

Cybersecurity Malware Analysis

2016-04-29

HyperScaling Malware Analysis

In the era of Big Data scalability is always a key concern. Simply throwing hardware at the problem isn’t enough. If the software architecture can’t fully take advantage of the available bandwidth and compute power, bottlenecks remain. One of VMRay Analyzer’s main advantages is our agentless hypervisor-based approach, allowing substantially

Cybersecurity Malware Analysis

2016-04-29

Automating Custom VM Setups

The automated creation and deployment of fully custom VMs (Virtual Machines) as analyses targets may seem like an arcane topic, but it’s crucially important to successful threat analysis, particularly for targeted attacks. There are several reasons: Targeted attacks using custom(ized) malware often will check for specific attributes on the target

Cybersecurity Malware Analysis

2016-04-29

Context-Aware Malware: Analyzing Environment-Sensitive Malware

Malware that evades detection is nothing new. But in a constantly evolving threat landscape, particularly around targeted attacks, we now see more Environment-Sensitive Malware. This is alternately known as context-aware or environment-aware malware. Not a low carbon footprint variety, but rather malware that is tailored to run only under certain

2015-09-15

Hello World – blogging for VMRay.

It’s day #2 for me at VMRay but in many ways I’ve really just come ‘home’ having already worked with the founders of VMRay for quite a few years when I ran Sunbelt Software’s Advanced Technology Group (sold to GFI and now spun out as ThreatTrack). When I got the

2015-09-01

Sandbox Evasion with COM by Malware in-the-Wild

In our recent blog post “Blinding Malware Analysis with COM Objects” we talked about the steady trend of malware using Microsoft’s Component Object Model (COM) for evading sandbox analysis. The reason why COM can be used to perform stealth operations is that traditional dynamic analysis systems monitor program behavior by

2015-08-31

ThreatConnect, Inc. Announces Partnership with VMRay

Merge malware analysis with intelligence sources to enhance research, detection and mitigation in ThreatConnect. Arlington, VA, August 14, 2015 – ThreatConnect, Inc., the leading provider of security services including the ThreatConnect® Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP), today announced a partnership with VMRay for ThreatConnect’s TC Exchange™. Current users of VMRay Analyzer

2015-07-30

VM Detection by Malware in the Wild

A key capability for malware is to prevent or delay analysis, usually by implementing dynamic malware analysis detection and evasion. When successful, this can substantially increase the time the malware can continue in the wild undetected, blocked or remediated. While most in-the-wild evasion techniques are rather simple, there also exist

2015-07-21

Blinding Malware Analysis with COM Objects

COM Introduction The Component Object Model (COM) is quite an old technology that was introduced by Microsoft in the early 90s. It allows the development and usage of binary software components in a language and architecture independent way. To this end, COM classes are provided by COM servers and can

2015-07-15

State premier Hannelore Kraft visits VMRay

This article is provided by courtesy of VMRay GmbH. As part of her Summer Tour #NRWVierNull focusing on the progress of digital change, the Prime Minister of the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Hannelore Kraft, visited VMRay GmbH in Bochum on 15 July 2015. Cyber security is an important part

2015-05-13

VMRay vs. Dyre Malware – Evasion Failed

Dyre is an advanced banking trojan family that uses phishing to hijack bank accounts from infected machines. According to estimates by researchers, the authors behind have already stolen over a million USD using this malware. It has been around for more than a year and is steadily updated to incorporate

2015-04-07

VMRay supporting more operating systems and hardware platforms

One of the great advantages of VMRay is that its core is completely agnostic to the targeted guest operating system and the underlying hardware platform. To utilize this great feature, we had have been busy working to add additional support for other guest operating systems during the last weeks. VMRay

2015-03-17

CrowdStrike leverages VMRay technology to enhance threat intelligence capabilities

This article is provided by courtesy of VMRay GmbH. Bochum, Germany: March 18th, 2015 – VMRay GmbH, provider of the fastest and most comprehensive threat analysis capabilities in the market, announced today that it has entered into a technology partnership with CrowdStrike Inc., a leading provider of next-generation endpoint protection,

2014-12-13

Quick Tour on the Wiper Malware

We published a 20 minute video that demonstrates how VMRay Analyzer can be used to automatically create detailed and comprehensive analysis of dangerous malware threats. To illustrate this process, we take a quick tour on the Wiper malware, that seemed to be involved in the latest Sony breaches.

2014-10-28

Brief look at recent Rovnix variant

Introduction Rovnix is currently one of the most prevalent 64-bit rootkits, especially since the source code leaked as part of the Carberp malware. Since then, every malware author has basically been able to create their own custom 64-bit rootkit version and we are therefore constantly seeing new variants in the

2014-07-31

Malware Analyzer Performance

Measuring performance of a malware analysis system in “samples per hour” is misleading and does not in any way give an accurate representation of it effectiveness. However, this measure is often used to conceal the significant overhead of such solutions. In practice, the throughput of “samples per hour” almost completely

2014-07-07

New Concepts for Kernel Mode Monitoring

VMRay Analyzer is currently still in its hot beta phase, however we plan to finish our first product release soon. In the past few weeks, we not only fixed bugs, but also improved our software by adding a number of additional functionalities. As you may already know, our new analyzer

2014-06-10

Beta Version of VMRay Analyzer

We recently completed the beta version of our malware analysis suite, VMRay Analyzer, and presented it to our pilot customers. The official product release date will be in July 2014, after we have fixed minor bugs in the high-level reports, as well as completed the .PDF and .DOC analysis. We

2014-05-15

High-Tech Gruenderfonds Invests in the Next-Generation Malware Analysis Software of VMRay GmbH

This article is provided by courtesy of VMRay GmbH. Bochum/Bonn May 15, 2014 – VMRay GmbH has successfully closed its seed financing round. High-Tech Gruenderfonds (HTGF) invests in the development and marketing of the next-generation malware analysis software of VMRay, which has a special focus on complex 64-bit malware such

2013-12-16

VMRay is further building its management strength

In its ramp-up to the market launch, VMRay, the next-generation malware-analysis company, is building its management strength and governance by adding two seasoned managers to its advisory board. This is another step towards rounding out the competencies of the company by adding special skills and specific, in particular geographical experiences.

2013-10-23

Interview with Founders

Meike Klinck interviewed Ralf Hund for the “AllesING”-magazine that regularly introduces spinoffs from the HGI institute of the Ruhr-University Bochum. The founder talks about the idea and uniqueness of the VMRay software and about the obstacles and challenges in founding a new company. The interview can be found here: http://www.ing.rub.de/news/news00111.html.de

2013-10-17

VB2013: Video & Slides

At this year VB2013 conference Ralf Hund gave a presentation on “Hardware-Assisted System Monitoring“. He described how modern hypervisor extensions can be utilized to realize a performant, transparent and isolated system monitoring. Use cases of this monitoring system are mainly the analysis of malware, especially of highly sophisticated instances such

Events and News

2013-07-23

VB2013: Speaker Spotlight

Carsten Willems and Ralf Hund have been interviewed about their research interests and what they aim to bring to VB2013. The VB2013 conference takes place this autumn (2-4 October) in Berlin, with an exciting programme that covers many of today’s most pertinent security-related topics. In the build-up to the event

Vmray threatfeed

Latest Malware Analysis Reports

Get The Latest Update

Subscribe to our newsletter

Keep up to date with our weekly digest of articles. Get the latest news, invites to events, and threat alerts!