ESET Threat Blog

As our December ThreatSense report (now available at http://www.eset.com/threat-center/threat_trends/Global_Threat_Trends_December_2009.pdf) was not only the last of the year but the last of the decade, it's rather longer and more detailed than usual, including a look back at the last 12 months. I suppose we could have gone back over the whole decade, but I have to … Read More…

OK, so I lied about not doing a top ten. Twice.
For a paper that's going through the publication process at the moment, I revisited some of the ideas that our research team at ESET LLC came up with this time last year for a top ten things that people can do to protect themselves … Read More…

ESET released its Global Threat Report for the month of September, 2009, identifying the top ten threats seen during the month by ESET's ThreatSense.Net™ cloud.  You can view the report here and, as always, the complete collection is available here in the Threat Trends section of our web site.  While the report identifies a number … Read More…

The Register has reported that it cost Ealing Council, in London (UK) some £500,000 in lost revenue and repairs after a "virus infection" in May. According to El Reg’s John Leyden, the virus in question was Conficker-D, though because of differences in Conficker variant naming, it’s difficult to say exactly which variant that would refer to. … Read More…

Microsoft has released the patches required to make autorun work with only CD and DVD drives. There is one little catch, a USB drive can be configured to look like a CD, but this patch definitely helps reduce risk.
I highly recommend you install the patch so that you can connect most thumb drives, GPS systems, … Read More…

Potentially Abandoned Conficker Grows
According to an article at Internetnews.com http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3832846 the authors of the Conficker botnet may have abandoned it, yet it continues to grow in numbers. The growth of the botnet is troubling because it is completely preventable and because it means the infected computers are vulnerable to other threats and that these users … 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…

One of my all time favorite quotes is by “"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana said this in The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Common Sense 284 (2nd ed., Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, New York 1924 (originally published 1905 Charles Scribner’s … Read More…

I’ve tried to convince you all that you really need to watch out for all of the threats and that it really isn’t worth worrying about Conficker, but if you are still worried about Conficker we do have a knowledge base article you can peruse at http://kb.eset.com/esetkb/index?page=content&id=SOLN2209.
If you apply your security patches, disable autorun, and … Read More…

I kept telling everyone to worry about being secure, not about Conficker. Some people listen, some don’t. So what happened over about the past 24 hours?
According to ESET’s ThreatSense.Net, by about 2 PM GMT on April 1st, of the top 20 threats encountered by our users in the past 24 hours, four out of five … Read More…