ESET Threat Blog

The consumer cloud expanded again this week with the addition of Google Drive to more familiar brands like Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive, Apple iCloud, and Amazon Cloud Drive. Unfortunately, most of these cloud-based file storage services come with privacy and security caveats, often involving language such as "You give us the right to access, retain, use … Read More…

Employee use of personally-owned computing devices for work-related purposes–known as Bring Your Own Device or BYOD–is not a new trend and security professionals have been concerned about it for some time, but there is a widely held view that the trend has been transformed of late. Why? Waves of mobile digital devices flooding into the … Read More…

A continuation on: Time to check your DNS settings?
After 7 March 2012, lots of people potentially can be hit as their systems are infected by a DNS Changer. Several government-CERTs have already warned their users. Rather than using the ISP’s DNS Servers, the malware has changed the settings to use DNS Servers controlled by the … Read More…

Way back in the 1990s, during the Q&A session after an EICAR presentation on social engineering, there was an animated discussion arising from some slides I'd included on password selection and usage. Some wondered why we were still discussing and promoting password strategies when there were (and are) better alternatives to static passwords.
ENTER PASSWORD:

Timeslip… Before you … Read More…

Newton's 3rd law is often stated as "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." Actually, what Newton actually said is a little more complex* than that, but this article isn't about physics (or else I'd leave the discussion to someone better qualified). 
The Internet, despite its grounding in the physical world of hardware … Read More…

Urban Schrott, my colleague at ESET Ireland, has been sharing some interesting statistical information in recent months from surveys conducted on the company's behalf in Ireland, covering such issues as infection patterns, attitudes to security and safe computing, and password usage, and much of that information has found its way into our monthly Threatsense Reports … Read More…

The Reuters news agency reported earlier today a sudden increase in violent and pornographic images and videos on Facebook.  A quick review of my personal account and a check-in with my other Facebook-wielding colleagues revealed a couple of nothing more than a couple of suggestive pictures, complete with snarky comments embedded in them, from the … Read More…

You can't have failed to notice that a lot of account/password combinations have been captured in recent years (especially this year) and made available on the Internet (e.g. Gawker, Rockyou, various Lulzsec dumps) for any bad actor to try to make use of. Not a good thing, but it has at least made it possible … Read More…

It has been 1,000 days since the Conficker worm first appeared on November 21, 2008.  For the first two months after its initial appearance we received a trickle of reports through our ThreatSense.NET telemetry system.  By January of 2009 that had become a flood, and then a deluge, as this “super worm” rose to meteoric … 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…