Visual Basic is a high-level programming language developed by Microsoft and based on the BASIC family of languages. Its main feature at the time of appearance was the ability to quickly create graphical interfaces and good integration with the COM model, which fostered easy access to ActiveX Data Objects (ADOs).
The last version of it was released in 1998 and the extended support for it ended in 2008. However, all modern Windows operating systems keep supporting it and, while it is rarely used by APT actors, many mass malware families are still written on it. In addition, many malicious packers use this programming language as well, often detected as Vbcrypt/VBKrypt or something similar. Finally, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is still widely used in Microsoft Office applications and was even upgraded to version 7 in 2010, is largely the same language as VB6 and uses the same runtime library.
In this section, we will dive into two different...
