ESET Threat Blog

If any of you out there who read this blog are going to be at Interop in Las Vegas next week, I’d love to meet you. I’ll be spending a lot of time at the ESET booth. I’d love to hear your ideas about the types of things you most like to see in the … Read More…

So Patch Tuesday has been and gone, and many of you will already have updated automatically. If you haven’t, do. there seems to be a curious complacency in some quarters about Powerpoint clientside exploits and targeted attacks, but a lot of dross gets passed around as slide-decks. For example, many an old hoax has been given … Read More…

 
Yesterday at the EICAR conference in Berlin <http://www.eicar.com> Dr. Fred Cohen was the keynote speaker. For any of you who do not know of Dr. Cohen, he is credited with coining the term virus to describe a self-replication program. Dr. Cohen also is credited with writing the first computer virus. The virus was written as … Read More…

So the CARO workshop came and went (and very good it was too): unfortunately, because of the nature of the event, I can’t tell you too much about it. However, at least some of the presentations are expected to be made available soon, and we’ll pass on that information when we have it.
After a very … Read More…

In the security industry there is fierce competition. At least in the anti-malware segment there is also tremendous cooperation. I am writing from the 3rd annual CARO workshop where researchers from several anti-malware companies are sharing important information with their competitors.
Quite a while back there both PCTools and ESET had false positives on each other’s … Read More…

Some of us are currently enjoying some excellent presentations at a CARO workshop in Budapest on exploits and vulnerabilities. Hopefully, some of them will eventually be made public, so that we’ll be able to include pointers to specific resources.
While there’s been a great deal of technical detail made available that has passed me by previously … Read More…

In light of yet another Twitter hack involving a Yahoo email password reset attack, you might think twice about the answers you provide for password reset questions.
Common password reset questions include the following:
What is your mother’s maiden name?
Where were you born?
What high school did you graduate from?
All of these and many others have answers that … Read More…

OK, PDFs don’t actually carry the swine flu, but PDFs are used to make your computer sick. The bad guys know that many people will open anything, regardless of where it came from, if it has bad news in it.
There have been a couple of vulnerabilities found in Adobe Acrobat recently. One of the vulnerabilities … Read More…

As we do each month, ESET has released its monthly threat report. As you might expect, there were a lot of Conficker detections out there. There were also almost as many detections for autorun threats that are not Conficker. In other words, if you have disabled autorun, then you protect against a lot more than … Read More…