ESET Threat Blog

You may have noticed that I’ve been making a lot of references to this over the past few weeks. You can now download it here. Quite a few people have worked pretty hard to make this project happen, and I’d like to thank them now. I hope some of you will find it interesting and … Read More…

Today is inauguration day in the USA. As I traveled to many countries late last year I was amazed at how joyous people of many cultures were that Obama is to be President of the USA.
Working in the security field, we see a lot of disappointment. Sometimes it seems that there is no hope of … Read More…

The top ten (twenty, twenty-five…) season doesn’t seem to have finished yet: the latest to cross my radar was something like seven ways of surviving the recession, which I’m sure is of interest to all of us, but not really in scope for this blog.
So here’s a snippet from our 2008 Global Threat Report, … Read More…

You might have noticed that Conficker (Downadup) is actually standing up rather well to all the attention it’s receiving at the moment.
Heise (a European publisher sending out a weekly security newsletter that’s often worth a closer look) that 2.5 million PCs are already infected. In The Register, Dan Goodin reports that the total has … Read More…

Here are a few rather disconnected items that I intended to blog about last week, but never had time to write up.
First of all, an interview with an adware author from philosecurity.org that went up on 12th January. Excerpt:
"Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, talks about his early days designing and writing adware … Read More…

As a Fellow of the British Computer Society (is that the sound of a self-blown trumpet I hear? ) I get daily emails that I often don’t have time to read. Which is a pity, because when I do, I often find an interesting nugget. Sometimes I even get a paper magazine (remember those?) through the … Read More…

CNN reported that there a new sleeper virus out there. http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/ptech/01/16/virus.downadup/index.html
There is nothing sleepy about the Conficker worm, it is wide awake and looking for people who are asleep at the security wheel.
CNN reports that Conficker could allow hackers to steal personal and financial data, and they also report that it “it is not very … Read More…

One of the security best practices is to back up your data regularly. This is sound advice as it helps mitigate the damages from many different threats. Lots of people think of data loss when they think of viruses, but very few viruses actually tried to cause data loss. There have been a few that … Read More…

There are different techniques that can be used by a program to identify in which country it has been installed.  It can check for time zone information, public IP addresses or even domain names.  Lately, we have seen two different malware families trying to discover their geographic location in an effort to avoid infecting PCs … Read More…

This is bizarre, if slightly nostalgic.
I spent a lot of time in the first half of this decade writing and presenting on problems with email filters that assumed that if the "From" field of an email header says that the sender was me@thenameofmysite.com (apologies to thenameofmysite.com if it actually exists, but I don’t think it … Read More…