ESET Threat Blog

A few months ago I wrote a fairly short comment piece for Virus Bulletin on how some popular posts to Facebook that invite you to make use of your personal data might be useful to scammers and others as part of some sort of data aggregation attack. An example I included was a popular posting … Read More…

Apologies if you're bored with my banging on about PC support scams, but it seems that there are plenty of people who aren't. At any rate, some of my previous blogs on the subject have attracted more comments than any of my blogs on other topics, and in fact, I've learned a great deal from some … Read More…

The wave of new data technology making its way into the next generation of cars – ranging from vehicles which semi-autonomously drive themselves, to realtime data streaming onto head's up displays – begs the question: will they be safe from cyber shenanigans, or will you have to deploy security software on your next (probably hybrid) … Read More…

The consumer cloud expanded again this week with the addition of Google Drive to more familiar brands like Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive, Apple iCloud, and Amazon Cloud Drive. Unfortunately, most of these cloud-based file storage services come with privacy and security caveats, often involving language such as "You give us the right to access, retain, use … Read More…

The Flashback trojan has been all over the news lately, but it is not the only Mac malware threat out there at the moment. A few weeks ago, we published a technical analysis of OSX/Lamadai.A, the Mac OS X payload of a multi-platform attack exploiting the Java vulnerability CVE-2011-3544 to infect its victims. OSX/Lamadai.A has … Read More…

What do printed QR codes and NFC (Near Field Communication) chips have in common, besides storing instructions that computers can read? They are both hackable and their ability to store and communicate computer instructions is bound to be abused, if not already, then sometime soon. This happens to every new means of communication; QR and … Read More…

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…

A while ago, I responded to a blog comment promising some thoughts on how to recognize a cold-calling PC support scam. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do that immediately, and then I was on vacation with no Internet connectivity (I should do that more often!). But then, since the problem isn't going to disappear any … Read More…

Phishers always try to find new ways to bypass security features and trick ‘educated’ users. Over the years we have seen simplistic phishing attempts where the required information had to be typed into the e-mail body. This worked at that time because phishing was new and hardly anyone had a notion of the implications. Later, … Read More…

[Updated to repair a glitch in the registration link.] 

I’ve had a long if intermittent association with the Anti-Phishing Working Group, going back to the early noughties when I represented the UK’s National Health Service there for a while, and subsequently as an individual member and through my association with ESET. Its focus has widened from … Read More…