ESET Threat Blog

Today we hand over the blog to Ms Letitia Teaspoon, ESET's Agony-Aunt-in-Residence.
Dear Holidays 2012, you placed the following comment on one of Mr. Harley's blogs:
I’m having some problems with Firefox, so I want to uninstall it and then reinstall it. But I want to save all my bookmarks, so can I save my bookmarks to … Read More…

Recently I've been collecting examples of comment spam. Essentially, this is for a research project that is somewhere fairly low on my to-do list. However, it does have a more positive aspect: whenever I feel at a loss for words and losing faith in my own wordsmithing ability, I scroll down to see what nice … Read More…

Some of my favourite blog comments of the week:
I’m surprised just how so many fish pedicure spas have sprung up in the uk without looking fully at the possible health risks to clients, or insuring against them.
Yes, I've often thought the same thing, especially in the context of disclosure ethics and the issue of hacking … Read More…

OK, I realize that it looks a little self-obsessed to keep writing about comment spam relating to your own blog.
Actually, while I did write about it recently, on that occasion it was for SC Magazine's Cybercrime Corner. And that was largely because I'm still chuckling at the concept of a comment spammer complaining about the … Read More…

So, a (long) while ago I wrote about the Haiti earthquake, with some commentary about the intersection between natural disasters, Black Hat SEO, scare tactics for education in good security practice, plus some links relevant to the earthquake. Well, I'm certainly not ashamed of that blog, though I haven't thought about it for a long time, … Read More…

As I've undoubtedly mentioned here before, one of the less obvious chores a security blogger has to find time for is to approve and - where appropriate - respond to comments. Though I use the term chore, it's by no means an unpleasant task: for every ill-mannered snottogram that gets submitted as a comment, there are many comments that … Read More…

Following up on blog comments is part of the job for those of us contributing to the ThreatBlog. Well, I suppose it is: no-one else does it if we don’t.
Much of the time, comment handling involves dealing with the occasional comment spam that slips through our filters (there’s an interesting item on a novel … Read More…

I’d like to say thanks to Sean, who commented on my first blog on Orbasoft blog spam (don’t miss the later blog!) as follows:
"These people are still not telling the truth. This software has been tested several times in the last few days and has been verified as a Rogue. It is on average detecting … Read More…

Many thanks to Jens in Denmark, who commented on my previous blog about Orbasoft comment spam. Jens says:
“Orbasoft is a real company, situated in Denmark. But they hired an Indian company to spam blogs with comments on their products (“search engine optimization”)…[they] wrote 300 positive comments – for the price of $900. ”
Well, it … Read More…

Comment spam is one of those nuisances that career bloggers see a lot of: at least, we would if we didn’t use filters to control most of it before it gets to us. In general, these either overtly advertize something which has nothing whatsoever to do with the blog topic, or say something that add … Read More…