ESET Threat Blog

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…

While I share the reluctance of my colleagues to predict the future, I think there are some trends that can be classified as “reasonably likely to occur” in 2012. I make no promises, but here’s what I think we will see, in no particular order of importance or certainty.

We will see increased interest in digitally … 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…

Scam artists and cyber-criminals welcomed today's news of the demise of Libyan leader Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi (often referred to as simply Gaddafi or Gadhafi). Why? Because few events fuel Internet search activity as much as the death of a famous–or infamous–person, although celebrity weddings and divorces are also a big search driver. It's a … Read More…

Recently I've been collecting examples of comment spam. Essentially, this is for a research project that is somewhere fairly low on my to-do list. However, it does have a more positive aspect: whenever I feel at a loss for words and losing faith in my own wordsmithing ability, I scroll down to see what nice … 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…

[NOTE:  As we were publishing this articl, our Latin American office discovered another Black Hat SEO campaign incorporating promises of Osama bin Laden videos on Facebook.  Click here to view their article in Spanish. We will follow up on this shortly.  AG]
The malware phenomenon started by the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death continues unabated, … Read More…

We're now seeing a fiercely concentrated Blackhat SEO campaigns exploiting the McAfee False Positive (FP) problem.

Juraj Malcho, our Head of Lab in Bratislava, reports that in a Google search like the one I've screendumped above, he got three malicious hits in the top ten (the same ones captured here: of course, the malicious domain names … Read More…

ESET is not going to try to capitalize on McAfee's unfortunate false positive problem (and nor, I'm sure, is any other reputable vendor). Such problems can arise for any AV vendor: it's an inevitable risk when you're trying to walk the line between the best possible detection of threats and avoidance of false detections (someone please … Read More…

I was asked whether I'd seen SEO (Search Engine Optimization) poisoning relating to the Icelandic eruption and the very widespread grounding of aircraft in Europe. Well, there were certainly attempts in March to exploit the earlier Eyjafjallajokull eruption in order to drive googlers interested in finding out more towards malicious web sites. So it would be naive … Read More…