ESET Threat Blog

Recession? What recession?
According to my colleague Urban Schrott, the UK is awash with so much money that the Prime Minister is mailing Irish citizens to tell them that their Overdue Inheritance payment of £2.5 million is waiting for them. The British Prime Minister, that is.
For the geographically and/or politically challenged, the Republic of Ireland hasn't … Read More…

Old western cowboys beware, this heist didn’t happen with a stagecoach at gunpoint, it’s a new era out there. A user, going by the username allinvain reports he had 25,000 Bitcoins (BTC) stolen when his computer was infected. At the current BTC exchange rate, that haul would net about $500,000. Not too shabby for a … Read More…

The US Department of Justice's announcement yesterday of the takedown of the command and  control (C&C) servers for the Coreflood bots (detected by ESET as Win32/AFCore) and seizure of their domains marks another step in the growing awareness that crime, whether it is committed with bullets or with botnets, is still crime. 
This particular botnet, about … Read More…

Here’s a little information from ESET’s point of view about the Coreflood botnet, whose C&C (Command and Control) servers were taken down yesterday by the Department of Justice. The Coreflood bot is detected by ESET products as Win32/Afcore and has been active since the early years of the last decade (certainly since 2001), though our … Read More…

This is a 419 (a so-called Nigerian scam letter) received via Facebook. Well, it doesn't look very Nigerian, and it includes a phone number that appears to be in Hong Kong (no, I haven't tried it out). But the letter, though perhaps more literate than some of the African scams I've seen, is standard Advance … Read More…

It must be be my lucky month. I've been getting lots of calls offering to save my PC from system errors. (Sadly, this is an instance where regional "don't cold call" lists don't help, since the calls are being routed from… well, if you've been following my blogs on this topic, you can guess where.) 
A few days … Read More…

Tip of the hat to @FSecure for directing my attention to a piece at Discovery News about 5 Unexpected Threats of Online Social Networking. The article touches on such issues as hidden charges for online games, information leakage through online apps, apps that send updates to your phone at a (substantial) charge, fake Facebook (et … Read More…

[UPDATE #1 at 12:15PM:  Added more information about location of earthquake and prior scams. AG]
We have just heard about the early September 4 (Saturday morning) earthquake near Christchurch, New Zealand, currently estimated at a Richter magnitude of 7.4. Our New Zealand distributor in Auckland is unaffected, but communications with the area are difficult.
As with any tragedy … Read More…

You may have gathered from some of the blogs published here last year that i'm not biggest fan of the BBC's "Click" programme. I regard the Beeb's forays into buying botnets and stolen credit card details and making active use of them as at best naive. I agree that people need to be aware of such issues, … Read More…

[Update: I had a couple of machine crashes while I was writing this, and only just realized that a pointer to Allan Dyer's excellent article at http://articles.yuikee.com.hk/newsletter/2009/12/a.html hadn't survived to the final version. Which is a pity, because it's very relevant, and well worth reading.]
Over the weekend, I posted a blog on the AVIEN site http://avien.net/blog/ … Read More…