ESET Threat Blog

Our colleagues at ESET UK drew my attention to another article on the resurrection of the Kelihos botnet (Win32/Kelihos).  The article is based on the abuse.ch analysis of a particular sample. The analysis is interesting and well executed, but the reappearance of Kelihos isn’t exactly hot off the press: there were several reports to that … Read More…

Bitcoins, a self-generated hash-based peer-to-peer currency with no centralized regulating body, are on a stratospheric trajectory, will it replace traditional legal tender as the currency of choice for cyber-nastiness? First, a little background.
Bitcoins first surfaced in a white paper purportedly by Satoshi Nakamoto. While no one can trace his (her) exact identity, it seems the … Read More…

Yesterday the US House of Representatives approved legislation that would specify and limit open-network P2P usage by government employees and contractors on systems authorized to connected to federal computers and network resources. As with everything in life, there are exceptions. Requests to use open-network P2P applications can be made for the following purposes:

necessary for the … Read More…

[Part 10 of an occasional series, updating a blog series I ran in early 2009 to reflect changes in the threat landscape. This series is also available shortly at http://www.eset.com/download/whitepapers.php as a white paper.]
Don’t be a Crackhead
Don’t use cracked/pirated software. Such programs provide an easy avenue for introducing malware into (or exploiting weaknesses in) a system. The … Read More…

And finally…
Don’t use cracked/pirated software! These are easy avenues for introducing malware into, or exploiting weaknesses in, a system. This also includes the illegal P2P (peer-to-peer) distribution of copyrighted audio and video files: some of these are counterfeited or modified so that they can be used directly in the malware distribution process.
Even if a utility … Read More…