ESET Threat Blog

So you browse your favorite restaurant review site and settle on a great Mediterranean restaurant, and “magically” a variety of preferences get fed back to your Facebook profile, to be shared, re-shared and re-shared, ricocheting around the internet to form purportedly value-added experiences elsewhere you visit. That’s great news if you want your preferences bounced … Read More…

Scam artists and cybercriminals are looking to turn romance into profit now that Valentine's Day approaches, possibly taking over your computer in the process. According to ESET researchers in Latin America, we can expect the quest for love to be leveraged as an effective social engineering ploy to enable the bad guys to infect unsuspecting … Read More…

Privacy and security issues have generated a lot of criticism of Facebook in the past, some of which has been published here on the ESET Threat Blog. So it is only fair that we give Facebook credit for positive steps it has taken on the security front. One security measure that has impressed me recently … Read More…

Aleksandr Matrosov, one of my colleagues in Moscow, writes:
This month we discovered some new facts relating to Win32/Carberp trojan activity. We have spent a lot of time writing about Carberp already, but interesting information is still coming to light. The first interesting information to attract our attention recently concerned stealing money from Facebook users. Before … Read More…

I tend not to try to compete with sites like Facecrooks that specialize in tracking malware issues: however, they've just flagged a scam that has apparently already tricked around 300,000 Facebook users into Liking a scam page, and are appealing for people to report it to Facebook in the hope of getting the scam site … Read More…

As increasing sectors of the internet migrate to Facebook as a deployment platform (Zygna, etc.), a new effort aims to spread the preference aggregation features to include things users either own or would like to own. By allowing users to add “Own” and “Want” buttons to their profile, users can highlight both a “Wishlist” and … Read More…

A couple of weeks ago, some of my Facebook friends were putting up messages telling the world what was number one in the charts the day they were born and in some cases providing a link to a video. While it was depressing to realize how young so many of my friends were – I … Read More…

Tomorrow, on January 18, 2012, dozens of popular websites covering a diverse range of subjects will be blacking out their home pages in protest of the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).  Some of these websites are well-known, such as the English language web site for the encyclopedic Wikipedia and quirky news site Boing Boing, … Read More…

If you use Facebook you've probably heard of Timeline, a "new" feature that replaces the "traditional" profile page. However, you may be confused by Timeline–I know I am–and confusion could make you the target of a growing number of Timeline-related scams. As of January 3rd, the watchful folks at Inside Facebook were reporting 16 Timeline-related … Read More…

…Or not.
Cheesecake Factory scams aren't new, but according to Facecrooks, there's an uptick today in rogue "Eat for Free at Cheesecake Factory!" wall posts. Sadly, there is still no such thing as a free lunch: it's a survey scam with no payoff. Well, not for you. The scammers seem to be doing quite nicely out … Read More…