ESET Threat Blog

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…

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…

Our July ThreatSense.Net® report has been released today, and will eventually be available from the Threat Center page here. Most of the top ten entries are old friends: well, familiar names might be a better way of putting it. One of the disadvantages of having a scanner that makes heavy use of advanced heuristics is … Read More…

SC Magazine in the UK picked up on our Global Threat Report for June, based on statistics that derive from our ThreatSense.Net® threat-monitoring technology. Thanks, Dan: when you do as much writing as I do, it’s comforting to know that someone is reading it.
I thought, though, I’d develop some thoughts on a topic arising … 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…

Larry Seltzer, one of the better commentators on malware issues, has picked up on the disparity between ESET’s naming of the latest variant and Symantec’s – they call it W32.Downadup.E. Richard Adhikari (who also seems to pretty clueful) also picked up on the naming issue when we exchanged emails a few days ago.
This issue kind … Read More…

So now for a little more tech detail on Win32/Conficker.AQ (kindly supplied by Juraj Malcho at our labs in Europe – however, if I get anything wrong, that will almost  certainly be down to my faulty interpretation!)
The new variant has two main components. The server component is an .EXE that infects vulnerable PC’s in the … Read More…

If you just got here looking for my blog on Conficker and "blended hoaxes", I’m afraid I just pulled it (temporarily at least) in the light of new data that’s come in since last night: I don’t want to mislead anyone, as it seems that the new Conficker stuff is a lot more active and … Read More…

Talking of the C-worm ("Will no-one rid me of this troublesome malware?") I mentioned in a blog from a couple of days ago that Jose Nazario supplied some useful information on an issue I was checking into.
The issue concerned reports from a Russian news site of Distributed Denial of Service attacks on Russian sites: the … Read More…