ESET Threat Blog

Actually $26, according to a study conducted by Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, which was able to hack a Diebold voting machine with “about $26 and an 8th-grade science education.” In light of the rapidly approaching 2012 U.S. Presidential Election, it seems there may be a need to give serious attention to securing our election … Read More…

You may have noticed a lot of excitement about Facebook's latest attempts to prune your privacy, and you'll probably see more commentary on this blog.
Here's something a little different: a good old-fashioned chainletter that seems to be flourishing despite all its logical flaws. The story is at SC Magazine's Cybercrime Corner, to which I regularly … Read More…

According to a post by a Facebook Photos engineer, they receive around 200 million photo uploads per DAY, or about 6 billion per month. A separate post says Facebook currently hosts 4% of all photos ever taken. Specifically, it hosts 140 billion photos out of 3.5 trillion photos taken in history. Also, we see “it … Read More…

An emerging information security threat highlighted this week by Róbert Lipovský, namely theft and abuse of digital certificates by malware creators, serves as a timely reminder that these certificates are highly valuable digital assets that should be accorded the highest levels of protection. If your company uses certs purchased from root authorities such as Verisign, … Read More…

ESET researchers Aleksandr Matrosov and Eugene Rodionov just gave a talk on Defeating x64: Modern Trends of Kernel-Mode Rootkits at the seventh Ekoparty security conference, which took place at its traditional location of Buenos Aires, Argentina between the 21st and 23rd of September.
The presentation described new trends in bootkit/rootkit development for x64 Microsoft Windows operating … Read More…

A new attack against Apple Mac OS X Lion (10.7) has been detected by Intego.  The threat is a trojan, dubbed Flashback, installed via a fake Adobe Flash installer downloaded from a third party site.
As with the MacDefender and Revir malware the Flashback attack uses social engineering to entice the user to download then install the … Read More…

New stolen digital certificates are used by the multi-purpose backdoor Qbot.
The criminals behind the Qbot trojan are certainly not inactive. As I mentioned in a blog post earlier this month, after a quiet summer we have seen a batch of new Qbot variants. An interesting fact is that the malicious binaries were digitally signed. The … Read More…

Unless you specifically cancel the 2-way communication aspect, the default setting will be to continue a communication link to OnStar once the subscription expires, raising the ire of customers who wonder what the company does with the data. OnStar says that data is anonymized, but customers fear data showing current vehicle location doesn’t seem very … Read More…

Yes, I know very well that it should be the Hippocratic Oath, but there may be those who think that someone who spends as much time talking to the media as I do should be careful not to cast the first stone from inside a glass house. (Bear with me: this really is going somewhere…)
Still, … Read More…

If you're a dedicated follower of Facebook, last week was a bit of a roller coaster. On Monday, Emil Protalinski at ZDNet reminded you that the stories appearing on Facebook about Lady Gaga being found dead in a hotel room are a “likejacking” scam. Then on Tuesday it was reported that Facebook has "introduced a … Read More…