ESET Threat Blog

[Updated to repair a glitch in the registration link.] 

I’ve had a long if intermittent association with the Anti-Phishing Working Group, going back to the early noughties when I represented the UK’s National Health Service there for a while, and subsequently as an individual member and through my association with ESET. Its focus has widened from … 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…

 Here are some further thoughts arising from the ACPO National Cyber Crime Conference held recently in the UK*.

DAC Janet Williams, ACPO’s e-Crime lead, summarized the current initiatives along these lines (apologies if I’ve introduced too many of my own preconceptions):

The UK intends to tackle cybercrime and make this one of the safest places to do … Read More…

 I spent a couple of days last week at the National Cyber Crime Conference in Sheffield*, UK.

I was invited there to talk about those PC support scams that have been raising my blood pressure for a while. (That’s a topic I’ll be returning to sooner rather than later.) While I very much enjoyed the opportunity … Read More…

Well, okay, if you happen to be an extremely fast reader. The Association of Anti Virus Asia Researcher’s (AVAR) 14th AVAR Conference just wrapped up in Hong Kong on Friday. This year, the focus was on security issues in and around the emerging Asian security market, and how to rise to the challenge. As one … Read More…

Forensic software developer PassWare announced a new version of its eponymous software forensics kit on Tuesday. Already several news sources are writing about how the program can automatically obtain the login password from a locked or sleeping Mac simply by plugging in a USB flash drive containing their software and connecting it to another computer … Read More…

Our colleagues Aleksandr Matrosov and Eugene Rodionov are tracking the evolution of TDL4 (also known as Win32/Olmarik). The following is a report on the latest TDL4 update, released last week.
In our previous blog post, we described how the latest Microsoft Security Update modified the Windows OS loader (winloader.exe) to fix a vulnerability that allowed the … Read More…

The Royal Academy of Engineering yesterday released a report on Global Navigation Space Systems: reliance and vulnerabilities as reported by Sophie Curtis in eWeek Europe in an article on Britain’s GPS Reliance Could Lead To ‘Loss Of Life’ (who quoted me, by the way, on what could happen in the event of a criminal attack). Well, it's not … Read More…

It will likely come as no surprise to regular readers of ESET's Threat Blog that we are somewhat gadget aficionados here in the Research Department. Our focus, however, is usually on issues such as malware, spam and privacy so we do not spend a lot of time discussing gadgetry.  Every once in a while, though, … Read More…

I recently learned a new acronym: SODDI (Some Other Dude Did It). What this refers to is the defense that criminals routinely use (plausible deniability) – and even more so when it comes to illicit activities on the Internet.
On Sunday, November 8th 2009 the Associated Press published an article regarding an individual that was … Read More…