ESET Threat Blog

I’m in Washington right now, at the CSI conference. It won’t surprise regular readers to know I’m here to talk about testing anti-malware products (again!) So it may not surprise you to know also that I’m particularly interested to see an article by Larry Seltzer that looks at the documents just approved by AMTSO (the Anti-Malware Testing … Read More…

Some people are talking about a technique called “white listing” as if it were the silver bullet that is going to save the world. It is… in the fantasy worlds. I think I can lay claim to a certain amount of expertise when it comes to white listing. White listing was fundamentally my job at … Read More…

I write this blog from Jakarta, Indonesia where yesterday I had a meeting with employees of the Koran Tempo. The Koran Tempo is a major magazine and news publication here. In the English edition of Tempo magazine there are several stories about Obama and the election in the US. One story that caught my eye … Read More…

…and it’s still hybrid. Or multi-layered, if you prefer. What anti-malware companies (and malware authors, if it comes to that) are constantly doing is revisiting concepts that have worked before so that they fit the current environment better: there’s nothing wrong with an evolutionary approach, but changing the terminology doesn’t make it revolutionary. So what Larry … Read More…

AMTSO, the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization, have just issue a press release about the guidelines documents just published on their web site after ratification by everyone present at the AMTSO meeting in Oxford at the end of October.
You may have noticed that we’re quite optimistic about the beneficial future impact of AMTSO on testing … Read More…

While you guys in the US were enjoying the swings and roundabouts of the presidential election, the government here in the UK was playing its usual role as fairground Aunt Sally to the UK media, on this occasion attracting criticism because of the ongoing leakage of sensitive information from government or government-related resources. The UK … Read More…

CNET, who hosts Download.com, has enjoyed a reputation for being a safe place to download software from. The program you download may be great or may be useless, but it had been “Tested Spyware Free.” At least that is what Download.com says about their downloads.
Today it has come to my attention that the site is … Read More…

Now here’s an old favourite I received today.

This  information arrived this morning direct from both Microsoft  and Norton.
Please  send it to everybody you know who has access to the  Internet. You may  receive an apparently harmless email with a Power Point  presentation 
‘Life  is beautiful.’
If you  receive it DO NOT OPEN THE … Read More…

The election may be over, but the bad guys are still milking it, and there are lessons to be learned. I guess there’s nothing that brings out the worst in human nature like an election. There were all those chain letters, rumours and hoaxes about how various candidates were undesirable, un-American, immoral etc.  Then there were … Read More…

Electronic voting machines are a controversial topic. They really should not be, but due to the inept implementation of this method of voting by vendors like Diebold and Sequoia, there are serious questions about their accuracy and resilience to fraud.
In 2005, Bruce Schneier wrote of some of the problems at http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/
11/the_problem_wit.html
In January 2008 the New … Read More…