ESET Threat Blog

Interesting news this week with some heavy anticrime work in Russia resulting in the arrests of the alleged RBS Worldbank cybercriminals. In related research I had to laugh out loud at this particular turn of phrase reported by the Financial Times;

The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB)has detained suspects including Viktor Pleshchuk, an alleged mastermind behind … Read More…

We have discussed SEO poisoning extensively in the ESET Threat Blog, and it should come as no surprise to our readers that any topic which trends up quickly in search engine traffic will be exploited by the criminals who specialize in such activities.  The poisoned search term du jour is "erin andrews death threat".  Apparently, … Read More…

Early last month I posted a blog entry entitled "Who Is Doing it? Who? Who….?!". The main point of my entry was regarding the matter of people opening attachments and clicking on links that appear to be spam based.
I've just been reading the 2010 MAAWG Email Security Awareness and Usage Report, and it seems that … Read More…

The Apple iPad is the current gadget du jour amongst the digerati and has been seeing strong presales, with estimates as high as 150,000 units on the first day.  With such attention in the media and the blogosphere, it is no wonder that both legitimate businesses and scammers have taken to using it as bait … Read More…

It has been a year since we last discussed fraudulent domain name registrar scams and we wanted to let people know that this scam continues unabated.
In a nutshell, a message is sent to a publicly-visible email address listed on your website (sales, support, the CEO's office, a public relations contact, et cetera) from a Chinese … Read More…

I received a fax today. Now, that may not be worthy of noting on here, apart from the fact that I hardly ever receive faxes these days. But the interesting fact is that it was sent to my US based fax number and offered me a great deal on a "New Health Plan" for only … Read More…

Well, I'm pretty sure I've been seeing spam for a bit more than ten years, as has CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) in its various incarnations. However, the blog by Neil Schwartzman that was put up yesterday at http://www.cauce.org/archives/155-This-Decade-in-Spam.html#extended covered only the notable events of the last decade. Which was indeed eventful enough.
In fact, it turns out … Read More…

So, in case you were wondering about the progress of my abuse report to Yahoo!, I did indeed get a response within 48 hours, thanking me for my communication, assuring me that they’d investigate, and informing me that they wouldn’t be letting me know about the outcome of that investigation, as they don’t disclose information about … Read More…

There’s nothing particularly new about Yahoo! group spam (no, wait, don’t go yet!) and I haven’t wasted much time on it so far, as what I’ve seen is pretty crude
But I’ve been noticing an increasing number of emails to one of my most visible accounts welcoming me to groups with random names: stuff like this.
From: … Read More…

We know that spam works: well, it works well enough for spammers to keep devoting time and money into pumping sewage into the arteries of the internet. The interesting question is why does it work?
The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), a global coalition of network operators and messaging providers who do some vital work … Read More…