ESET Threat Blog

Yesterday’s announcement by the US Department of Justice that the operators of file-sharing site Megaupload had been indicted for operating a criminal enterprise that generated over $175 million by trafficking in over half a billion dollars of pirated copyrighted material has sent shockwaves across the Internet.  The accuracy of those figures may be questionable, but … Read More…

ESET's Threat Report for October has just gone up on the ESET Threat Center page. Apart from information on the Top Ten Threats of the month, it also includes:

An article by ESET Ireland's Urban Schrott on how safe people feel online, based on a recent survey in Ireland
An article by David Harley wondering whether when … Read More…

Surprised to find annual cybercrime damage spread somewhere between 300 million and 54 BILLION? So is the Director of National Intelligence. Today Brian Krebs of the Washington Post and Krebsonsecurity.com detailed a strong push for mandatory disclosure of cyber intrusion to include account hijacking and online identity theft:

A group tasked with devising strategies to deter … Read More…

Now that cyberwarfare is out of the bottle, will anyone agree to not use it? In the summer of 1945 in New Mexico, the Trinity test gave rise to the term ground zero. Could Stuxnet may be measured as a definitive ground zero in cyberwarfare comparable to Trinity?
Concerning Stuxnet’s latest rise in China, David Harley … Read More…

In researching today’s SC Magazine Cybercrime Corner article “From sci-fi to Stuxnet: Exploding gas pipelines and the Farewell Dossier”, I came across this ‘Damn Interesting’ article which showcases the successful cyberwarfare compromise of a SCADA / pipeline control system nearly thirty years ago, an event which I had heard stories about in Navy circles but … Read More…

While the defining research on the Stuxnet topic doesn’t go this far, Forbes writer Trevor Butterworth went out on a limb to name names along with detailing the warfare aspects:

As I noted last week – and as the news media have only begun to grasp – Stuxnet represents  a conceptual change in the history of … Read More…

Really – should any Alpha version be fed through a chipper-shredder like Diaspora has? The basics are simple:

The basic premise behind Diaspora is that it will allow users to have social networking functionality similar to that offered by Facebook, but with far greater control over personal data.
Diaspora was born earlier this year largely in response … Read More…

In my ever-widening circle of anti-cybercrime methodology this particular approach to attribution of the criminals looting the free world makes me particularly gleeful and I can’t wait to spread the good news:

Security company HBGary today released an open source tool to digitally fingerprint malicious code and help identify the source of the malware. The … Read More…

In a page directly out of Hollywood’s Terminator script the US Navy released details today about a rogue robot helicopter which diverted twenty-three miles penetrating restricted Washington DC airspace (ADIZ) after a complete loss of command and control on August 2nd due to “software anomaly.” Considering that a trojan-infected maintenance system is partially responsible … Read More…

Believe it or not, this cybercrime has some twists reminding all of us to beware the estranged techie ex who decides to hack email or instant messaging accounts and then escalate to Facebook friending.
Enter Harry W Bruder. This handsome devil is in his mid fifties, proving that not every Facebook user is a … Read More…