ESET Threat Blog

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…

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…

Update: It seems like the initial article is inaccurate and that Paul Rellis never made any such comments about a 14 year old breaking into the X-Box live servers and have not offered to mentor him http://kotaku.com/5805742/microsoft-is-helping-an-xbox-live-hacker-develop-his-talent
TekGoblin reports (http://www.tekgoblin.com/2011/05/27/14-year-old-call-of-duty-hacker-hired-by-microsoft/) that a teenager who broke into the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 gameservers last month, … Read More…

So how hard is it to kill a cell phone?
GSMWorld gave me great statistics on phone usage: as of June 2009 there were 4.3 Billion cellular users. Imagine the number of phones matching the number of PCs under botnet control – 15% this year. That would equal 600 million cell phones. Now imagine 600,000,000 zombied … Read More…

Forbes contributor Richard Stennion doesn’t like the Cybersecurity Act of 2010 very much. We know it around here as S. 773 and have been tracking it for some time. Mr. Stennion and I disagree on some key points. He says that S. 773:

“…contains some pretty drastic measures that are going to be very disruptive, and … Read More…

Within the past month we at ESET’s Threat Blog have been hammering away at the gap between user education about privacy, the realistic expectation of privacy in the digital age, and how corporations view individual privacy. Today I read an eye-opening revelation about Accenture’s global Data Privacy Report talking about How Global Organizations Approach the … Read More…

 Better get your CFO to review UCC Article 4A and realign protocols with your business bank – The clear and present danger to our banking through malware hits at the heart of our economy: the SMB. Stealthy malware-based theft of funds start the clock ticking much quicker than most SMB owners realize and without action … Read More…

Clearly, anything which is posted online should be assumed to be eternal, written in stone tablets, and admissible for all time. For the early adopter (Internet, blogger, Friendster, etc.) this also operates as a reminder of the ever-powerful TOS change: just because the terms of service (TOS) say that your content is private now never … Read More…

After posting the article regarding this new legislature I continued my research into the objections which have been raised by many cyber activists. Some of the concern is about ‘Net Neutrality’ and the potential for abuse of power. Let’s look first at the issue of content-neutral or client-neutral packet routing.
Net Neutrality – A Deeper Dive
Terry … Read More…

"Now may I suggest some of the things we must do if we are to make the American dream a reality. First, I think all of us must develop a world perspective if we are to survive. The American dream will not become a reality devoid of the larger dream of brotherhood and peace and … Read More…