ESET Threat Blog

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…

 
Just a quick follow up on the Microsoft Security Advisory (2501696) post that my colleague Randy Abrams wrote about on January 28th regarding Microsoft's recent MHTML vulnerability, which is listed by ESET as HTML/Exploit.CVE-2011-0096.A in our signature database.
 
Although reports remain low so far, any vulnerability in a particular version of Microsoft Windows is likely to … Read More…

Every layer of protection you add will harden the target against cybercrime. SmartScreen technology found in Internet Explorer 8 has recently clocked over 1 billion blocked potential malware downloads from malicious sites. By way of Terry Zink’s blog:

1 billion malware blocks is an amazing milestone and an example of two things.
First socially engineered attacks … Read More…

The attacks from cybercriminals are now occurring in the online stock and equity trading world. Instead of simply emptying out compromised brokerage accounts, cybercriminals apparently are refining their attacks and striking at broader and more lofty goals: the trust mechanisms of business equity valuations with publicly traded stocks and equities.
George Hulme, InformationWeek contributing writer … Read More…

Earlier this month, we reported on the massive new Koobface campaign making the rounds through Facebook and how it tricked users into downloading and running it through that tenet of social engineering, the fake codec. We now have a video showing how the Koobface worm tricks users into running it:

NOTE: The audio is not completely … 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…

I was speaking with our friend David Perry at Trend Micro about the insecurity of social networking services and what steps users could take to strengthen their security online. In the course of our conversation, we came up with a list of simple steps you could take to better protect yourselves.

Be careful about whom you befriend. Many … Read More…

Perhaps I imagined it, but a few days ago when I allowed Firefox to update to fix security vulnerabilities my privacy settings were reset to less private settings. I had Firefox set to clear the history on exit, and prompt me. I also had it set not to accept third party cookies. After the upgrade … Read More…

In the security industry there is fierce competition. At least in the anti-malware segment there is also tremendous cooperation. I am writing from the 3rd annual CARO workshop where researchers from several anti-malware companies are sharing important information with their competitors.
Quite a while back there both PCTools and ESET had false positives on each other’s … Read More…

Don’t trust unsolicited files or embedded links, even from friends.
It’s easy to spoof email addresses, for instance, so that email appears to come from someone other than the real sender (who/which may in any case be a spam tool rather than a human being). Basic SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) doesn’t validate the sender’s … Read More…