ESET Threat Blog

“Operation Swiper” just busted the largest theft ring of its type in U.S. history. The $13 million dollar crime ring was exposed after a 2 year investigation by the New York City Police, primarily centering around selling Apple electronics overseas, according to Reuters. New York City Police Raymond Kelly said at a press conference “The … Read More…

A little while ago, one of my Facebook friends mentioned that his Google+ account had been suspended because his name breached community standards. Probably, I suggested, because his name was the same as a character in a Star Trek movie, and it was flagged as pseudonymous. 
Looks as if I was probably correct. Or someone over … Read More…

Facebook recently launched a facial recognition feature that allows you and others to “tag” photos with your name. As has been the norm for Facebook, this “feature” is turned on by default and users must take their own initiative to limit, or turn it off. The implications are wide-ranging, so if you or anyone in … Read More…

The death of Osama bin Laden has gone viral, with blogs, social media and search engines pumping terabytes of rumor, innuendo and conspiracy theories at the speed of light, along with the occasional kilobyte of truth.  As the number of people searching for pictures and videos of bin Laden’s execution has skyrocketed, the criminal syndicates … 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…

My attention was just grabbed by a Infosec Island post on Social Security Numbers Easily Cracked, by Robert Siciliano. That's because I remembered quite a lot of fuss about it being made back in 2009.
And it turns out that the article, though posted today, is actually referring back to an article from July 2009 by Robert … Read More…

[C. Nicholas Burnett, the manager for ESET LLC's tier three technical support, contributed the following guest blog article on the FireSheep plugin for Firefox.  Thank you very much, Carl!  Aryeh Goretsky]
The past several days have seen the security community abuzz about a program presented in San Diego at ToorCon 12 this last weekend called FireSheep. … Read More…

Believe it or not, this cybercrime has some twists reminding all of us to beware the estranged techie ex who decides to hack email or instant messaging accounts and then escalate to Facebook friending.
Enter Harry W Bruder. This handsome devil is in his mid fifties, proving that not every Facebook user is a … Read More…

The Internet is abuzz with the announcement from Verisign’s iDefense Labs that a criminal hacker on a Russian forum who goes by the nom-de-plume "Kirllos" (Carlos?) is selling the credentials for 1.5 million Facebook accounts in batches of a thousand for between $8 and $30, depending upon their quality (which, in this case, means dates … 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…