ESET Threat Blog

As written in our “Password management for non-obvious accounts” blog post on February 22, the FBI confiscated the DNS Servers used by the DNS Changer malware and replaced them with different servers so that infected users would not be left without internet right away. Initially these replacement DNS Servers were to be taken offline on … Read More…

Malicious software that gets updates from a domain belonging to the Eurasian state of Georgia? This unusual behavior caught the attention of an analyst in ESET's virus laboratory earlier this year, leading to further analysis which revealed an information stealing trojan being used to target Georgian nationals in particular. After further investigation, ESET researchers were … Read More…

On the "old hoaxes never die" tack,it seems that last year's Christmas Tree App "virus" warning is circulating again: at any rate, Facecrooks has found it necessary to put a warning on its Facebook page against spreading it.
There is plenty of information available about this little beauty, so I'll just give you a few pointers:

Facecrooks … Read More…

Yes, I know very well that it should be the Hippocratic Oath, but there may be those who think that someone who spends as much time talking to the media as I do should be careful not to cast the first stone from inside a glass house. (Bear with me: this really is going somewhere…)
Still, … Read More…

Barely had I blogged at (ISC)2 about the Proudhonist contention that “(Intellectual) Property is Theft” than I came upon an article by Andrew Orlowski for The Register in which he uses a similar tag line (“Property is theft, man. So we're taking yours”). While both articles are concerned with breaches of copyright and IP abuse, … Read More…

A little while ago, one of my Facebook friends mentioned that his Google+ account had been suspended because his name breached community standards. Probably, I suggested, because his name was the same as a character in a Star Trek movie, and it was flagged as pseudonymous. 
Looks as if I was probably correct. Or someone over … Read More…

Just when I think maybe the traditional hoax/chain message is finally dying (or at any rate the type that describes mythical malware), along comes another, though it’s spreading through Facebook rather than email as in days of old. I've included some more information in a blog here about “the Christmas Tree app” hoax first cited by … Read More…

While this is probably of marginal interest to anyone outside the UK, even those who look upon the UK's National Health Service as convincing proof that state-sponsored healthcare is a Bad Thing, I had an interesting chat with Dan Raywood of SC Mag recently, which he subsequently wrote up as an article which is now … Read More…

I don't suppose anyone remembers my mentioning this before, or cares much anyway, but the 19th of December marks what I consider to be the 20th official anniversary of my entry into the anti-virus/security field.
Nowadays, viruses (and, in general, worms) have declined in importance and now constitute a fairly small proportion of the totality of … Read More…

"Viruses Revealed", which I wrote with Robert Slade and Urs Gattiker, isn’t exactly my latest book. In fact, it was published by Osborne in 2001, and has been out of print for several years. Still, I have some fond memories of it: for a start, it was my first book in the security arena as one … Read More…