ESET Threat Blog

Here are two staggering Facebook privacy statistics: Nearly 13 million US Facebook users have never set, or don’t know about, Facebook’s privacy tools, and only 37 percent have used Facebook's privacy tools to customize how much information is shared with third parties. That's according to a Consumer Reports survey released earlier this month. Given that … Read More…

I recently signed up for Pinterest.com, a hip, trendy pin board style website that allows beefed up sharing of your interests with friends via a large visual bulletin board style forum where fans of a particular subject can post what they find compelling, and want to share. Then other friends can weigh in on the … Read More…

Scam artists and cybercriminals are looking to turn romance into profit now that Valentine's Day approaches, possibly taking over your computer in the process. According to ESET researchers in Latin America, we can expect the quest for love to be leveraged as an effective social engineering ploy to enable the bad guys to infect unsuspecting … 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…

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…

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…

Since yesterday’s Much Ado About Facebook post in the ESET Threat Blog, we have written additional articles, received a few comments, and also received updated information on the “threat,” so it seems that now is a good time for a follow-up article.  Reports continue to come in of pornographic and violent imagery on Facebook, and … 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…

Some readers will know that I often contribute articles to SC Magazine's Cybercrime Corner. Here are a couple that have gone up today.

Social engineering and social media starts from Symantec's transient false positive detection of Facebook as a malicious site, and goes on to consider a more serious side to the event, in the light of … Read More…

…though I did describe Facebook as the natural home of hoaxes, in a blog referring to an article for SC Magazine in which I described a very specific hoax. However, if you came across that reference in an article by Jay Decenella, you could become very confused.
Delcenella includes the quote, totally out of context, in an … Read More…