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…

I have been blogging about support scams for quite a while and I figure this might be a good time to highlight some of the snippets of information that people have posted on some of those blogs (anonymized, of course). You can also find more about these support scams on the resource page I've started … 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…

While the so-called Fawkes Virus remains a nebulous idea, as I mentioned here yesterday, there's now much more information about the wave of offensive Facebook content that some have attributed to Anonymous and/or the Fawkes thing. Here are some of the better information sources we have identified .

Richi Jennings aggregated a number of comments for Computer World.
Facebook was widely quoted … 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…

You can't have failed to notice that a lot of account/password combinations have been captured in recent years (especially this year) and made available on the Internet (e.g. Gawker, Rockyou, various Lulzsec dumps) for any bad actor to try to make use of. Not a good thing, but it has at least made it possible … Read More…