ESET Threat Blog

At ESET, we spend a great deal of time researching the latest technologies and how they may be affected by frauds and scams.  Sometimes these are "old fashioned" spam through email, or they may be programs like fake antivirus programs or ransomware. And we certainly have blogged extensively about PC support scams where the caller … Read More…

 In a recent blog I linked to my recent EICAR paper on AMTSO, but I also referred to an upcoming AMTSO workshop (last week in Munich, which explains the entirely gratuitous photograph taken at the Weihenstephan brewery) in which I anticipated a great deal of discussion about future directions.
Having returned a few days ago from … Read More…

Like Facebook, Twitter wants to know which websites you visit and so it has a system for tracking you as you click from site to site, a fact that leads to a pair of interesting questions: "Did you know that?" and "Are you okay with that?" As we will see in a moment, this system … Read More…

If the smartphones of ESET bloggers are any indication, scams executed via SMS text, known as smishing or SMS phishing, are on the rise. I don't do a lot of texting, which makes a smish easy to spot on my phone, but I just read an amazing statistic from a Pew report: Users 18 to … Read More…

Back in 2008, EICAR rejected a paper proposed by Andrew Lee and myself discussing the state of anti-malware testing and how it might be improved, on the grounds that it was “advertising” the fledgling AMTSO (Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization) initiative. You can decide for yourselves whether that criticism was justified: the same paper was accepted … Read More…

Here are two staggering Facebook privacy statistics: Nearly 13 million US Facebook users have never set, or don’t know about, Facebook’s privacy tools, and only 37 percent have used Facebook's privacy tools to customize how much information is shared with third parties. That's according to a Consumer Reports survey released earlier this month. Given that … Read More…

When we relayed the FBI/IC3 warning to travelers about a threat involving hotel Internet service overseas last week it produced a lot of requests for advice on how to respond to the threat. So a few of us researchers at ESET came up with a list of data security tips for travelers. These tips will … Read More…

We have just completed fresh analysis of the malicious software known as Win32/Festi. While the "Festi" botnet created with this malware has been in business since the autumn of 2009 we can see that the software is frequently updated, as described in our analysis, and these updates mean Festi continues to be a potent threat … Read More…

We received a worrying notice today from the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) which is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), The headline reads: "Malware Installed on Travelers' Laptops Through Software Updates on Hotel Internet Connections." We felt that the warning which followed the … Read More…

A few months ago I wrote a fairly short comment piece for Virus Bulletin on how some popular posts to Facebook that invite you to make use of your personal data might be useful to scammers and others as part of some sort of data aggregation attack. An example I included was a popular posting … Read More…