ESET Threat Blog

Back in 2008, EICAR rejected a paper proposed by Andrew Lee and myself discussing the state of anti-malware testing and how it might be improved, on the grounds that it was “advertising” the fledgling AMTSO (Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization) initiative. You can decide for yourselves whether that criticism was justified: the same paper was accepted … Read More…

In a recent blog on whether security professionals really don't use anti-virus (sorry, but quite a few of us do!) I mentioned a paper by myself and Julio Canto on the use and misuse of multi-scanner sites like VirusTotal.  Especially the (Virus-)totally inappropriate use of VT reports as some sort of substitute for real comparative testing.
I … Read More…

So farewell, then, 2011. (With apologies to Private Eye's poet-less-than-laureate E.J. Thribb.)
ESET's December ThreatSense Report, as before, looks at threat trends over the year, rather than just the past month. In particular, we've noted that despite the very real impact of Microsoft's countermeasures this year against infection by the type of threat we generally categorize as … Read More…

ESET's Threat Report for October has just gone up on the ESET Threat Center page. Apart from information on the Top Ten Threats of the month, it also includes:

An article by ESET Ireland's Urban Schrott on how safe people feel online, based on a recent survey in Ireland
An article by David Harley wondering whether when … Read More…

Well, the EICAR conference earlier this month was in Krems, in Austria, where I hear that they're not averse to the occasional brandy, but I was actually perfectly sober when I delivered my paper on Security Software & Rogue Economics: New Technology or New Marketing? (The full abstract is available at the same URL.)
To conform with EICAR's usual … Read More…

Here's another conference paper we've put up recently on the white papers page at http://www.eset.com/download/whitepapers.php.
"Whatever Happened to the Unlikely Lads? A Hoaxing Metamorphosis" by David Harley and Randy Abrams, was presented at the 19th Virus Bulletin Conference in Geneva in 2009,
The paper was first published in Virus Bulletin 2009 Conference Proceedings.
Copyright is held by Virus … Read More…

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet the past few days. That’s because I really needed to do catch up with other things. Sad though I am to have missed the opportunity to jeer at Mikeyy the Worm and his new employer (though I may come back to them shortly, just … Read More…