ESET Threat Blog

I tend not to try to compete with sites like Facecrooks that specialize in tracking malware issues: however, they've just flagged a scam that has apparently already tricked around 300,000 Facebook users into Liking a scam page, and are appealing for people to report it to Facebook in the hope of getting the scam site … Read More…

Yesterday’s announcement by the US Department of Justice that the operators of file-sharing site Megaupload had been indicted for operating a criminal enterprise that generated over $175 million by trafficking in over half a billion dollars of pirated copyrighted material has sent shockwaves across the Internet.  The accuracy of those figures may be questionable, but … Read More…

Tomorrow, on January 18, 2012, dozens of popular websites covering a diverse range of subjects will be blacking out their home pages in protest of the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).  Some of these websites are well-known, such as the English language web site for the encyclopedic Wikipedia and quirky news site Boing Boing, … Read More…

Perhaps it's some kind of link left over from all those ships from the Spanish Armada that found themselves making landfall on the West Coast of Ireland, or maybe it's an obscure allusion to the beleaguered Eurozone, but my colleague Urban Shrott passed on to me a spate of rather unusual lottery spams. You may be familiar … Read More…

Manipulating search results for trending topics like "Breaking Dawn" and "Taylor Swift" is a nasty phenomenon that is getting nastier, producing fraudulent and potentially costly results in response to innocent searches. As we described in our Search Poisoning video, the goal of this fraud is to trick people into loading web pages that they would … Read More…

Well, yes, that title is from a song by John D. Loudermilk, written with some (possibly accidental) prescience way back in 1962. Given the aggravation that 21st century phishing causes Google users, perhaps it's time for a new song dedicated to that particular pastime. In the meantime, I thought I'd mention a shoal of the … Read More…

The United States Attorney Office for the Southern District of New York received a flurry of attention in April, 2011 when they unsealed an indictment against the three largest Internet poker companies in the United States—Absolute Poker, Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars—for fraud, gambling and money laundering.  Today, the USAO upped the ante with an … Read More…

Internet scams are not new, and some of the strategies they use are not unique to the Internet, but there is no doubt that the Internet can provide a multiplier effect for people intent on defrauding others. I discovered a "good" example of this when I started looking for a place to live in San … Read More…

Yeah, yeah, yet another coldcall scam post, but featuring a ploy I haven't come across before, intended to convince you that the scammer really knows something about your system, so that you're likelier to fall for the scam. 
Rebecca Herold reports for InfosecIsland that she was contacted by one of those helpful "support desk" people who … Read More…

Sitting in an airport you rarely frequent, you grab your laptop and snap out a couple e-mails to send, and look, there’s a free WiFi hotspot. Bang, you connect and send, and are off on your way. What you don’t know is the free WiFi may come with a price: your login credentials and network … Read More…