ESET Threat Blog

Here are two staggering Facebook privacy statistics: Nearly 13 million US Facebook users have never set, or don’t know about, Facebook’s privacy tools, and only 37 percent have used Facebook's privacy tools to customize how much information is shared with third parties. That's according to a Consumer Reports survey released earlier this month. Given that … Read More…

A few months ago I wrote a fairly short comment piece for Virus Bulletin on how some popular posts to Facebook that invite you to make use of your personal data might be useful to scammers and others as part of some sort of data aggregation attack. An example I included was a popular posting … Read More…

Attention CEOs and HR Managers: Facebook login credentials belonging to current or prospective employees are not something that any employer should request, use, or posses. Why? Apart from the violation of security and privacy principles? The risks far outweigh any benefit you imagine you could gain by logging into a social media account that does … Read More…

Fraudsters continue to innovate their scam propagation methods. Again using Facebook and a pretense of a shocking video, they also utilize browser plugins to execute malicious scripts. We also see how the malware scene is intertwined, when the user is directed to a dubious Potentially Unwanted Application.
Facebook auto-like scams have been commonplace on the world’s … Read More…

Computer security is not created, nor is it improved, by calling people stupid. That's the conclusion I have arrived at after more than two decades in computer security and auditing. To put it another way, we should stop dropping the "S" bomb, especially when it comes to people who don't know any better.
Consider the phenomenon … Read More…

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…