ESET Threat Blog

At ESET, we spend a great deal of time researching the latest technologies and how they may be affected by frauds and scams.  Sometimes these are "old fashioned" spam through email, or they may be programs like fake antivirus programs or ransomware. And we certainly have blogged extensively about PC support scams where the caller … Read More…

Introduction
Mobile World Congress 2012 is almost upon us, and one of the most hotly-anticipated topics is the next generation of Microsoft’s smartphone operating system Windows Phone 8, which has been kept under wraps far more tightly than its PC counterpart, Windows 8.
While Microsoft was an early adopter in the creation of smartphones with Windows Mobile, … Read More…

Tomorrow, on January 18, 2012, dozens of popular websites covering a diverse range of subjects will be blacking out their home pages in protest of the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).  Some of these websites are well-known, such as the English language web site for the encyclopedic Wikipedia and quirky news site Boing Boing, … Read More…

Our white paper on Potentially Unwanted Applications (PUAs) has been revised with additional information, including information about how legitimate software can become classified as a PUA due to its misuse, a discussion of a type of downloader called a software wrapper and updated screen shots. It can be found in the White Papers section  Problematic, … Read More…

While I share the reluctance of my colleagues to predict the future, I think there are some trends that can be classified as “reasonably likely to occur” in 2012. I make no promises, but here’s what I think we will see, in no particular order of importance or certainty.

We will see increased interest in digitally … Read More…

Since yesterday’s Much Ado About Facebook post in the ESET Threat Blog, we have written additional articles, received a few comments, and also received updated information on the “threat,” so it seems that now is a good time for a follow-up article.  Reports continue to come in of pornographic and violent imagery on Facebook, and … Read More…

The Reuters news agency reported earlier today a sudden increase in violent and pornographic images and videos on Facebook.  A quick review of my personal account and a check-in with my other Facebook-wielding colleagues revealed a couple of nothing more than a couple of suggestive pictures, complete with snarky comments embedded in them, from the … Read More…

The United States Attorney Office for the Southern District of New York received a flurry of attention in April, 2011 when they unsealed an indictment against the three largest Internet poker companies in the United States—Absolute Poker, Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars—for fraud, gambling and money laundering.  Today, the USAO upped the ante with an … Read More…

It has been 1,000 days since the Conficker worm first appeared on November 21, 2008.  For the first two months after its initial appearance we received a trickle of reports through our ThreatSense.NET telemetry system.  By January of 2009 that had become a flood, and then a deluge, as this “super worm” rose to meteoric … Read More…

Forensic software developer PassWare announced a new version of its eponymous software forensics kit on Tuesday. Already several news sources are writing about how the program can automatically obtain the login password from a locked or sleeping Mac simply by plugging in a USB flash drive containing their software and connecting it to another computer … Read More…