ESET Threat Blog

With the publication last year of Aryeh Goretsky's paper “Twenty years before the mouse,” a personal perspective on  the history of viruses and malware so far, I took the opportunity to try something a little different for this blog by announcing it here in an article in an interview format.  
Since people seemed to like it, we … Read More…

Dear Twitter,
I'm afraid our relationship is just not working these days: in fact, we seem to have stopped communicating almost immediately you cosied up to our mutual friend Tweetdeck. Clearly, I'm the spare part in this relationship, since Tweetdeck isn't talking to me much, either. How can you treat me like this?
Since I'm not … Read More…

It's been a busy few weeks. Last week I was in Krems, Austria for the EICAR conference. The week before, I was in Prague for the CARO workshop (where my colleagues Robert Lipovsky, Alexandr Matrosov and Dmitry Volkov did a great presentation on "Cybercrime in Russia: Trends and issues" – more information on that shortly), … Read More…

Well, the EICAR conference earlier this month was in Krems, in Austria, where I hear that they're not averse to the occasional brandy, but I was actually perfectly sober when I delivered my paper on Security Software & Rogue Economics: New Technology or New Marketing? (The full abstract is available at the same URL.)
To conform with EICAR's usual … Read More…

I may have mentioned from time to time that ESET is a strong supporter of AMTSO (the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization), an international organization that promotes improved methodologies for testing security products.
Last week we held an AMTSO workshop in Prague. While there was some hard discussion around some topics that I'll come back to in … Read More…

April? Haven't we moved on from there?
Well, yes, but ESET's ThreatSense report for April does include, apart from some information on the top ten threats for the month, a feature article by Urban Schrott on the far-from-dead 419 scam, some information on recent and upcoming events such as the AMTSO workshop (which I've just attended: much more information on that … Read More…

The March Threatsense report at http://www.eset.com/us/resources/threat-trends/Global_Threat_Trends_March_2011.pdf includes, apart from the Top Ten threats:

a feature article on Japanese-disaster-related scamming by Urban Schrott and myself
news of the Infosec Europe expo in London on the 19th-21st April, the AMTSO and CARO workshops in Prague in May, and the EICAR Conference in Austria that follows
the story of a fake AV … Read More…

The February ThreatSense Report is now available from the ESET Threat Center. As well as the top ten threats reported globally by our ThreatSense.Net telemetry, it includes feature articles from Josep Albors and Urban Schrott, as well as some shorter news items:

From Russia with spam (Josep Albors)
Misplaced trust in trustworthy names? (Urban Schrott)
Nothing exceeds like … Read More…

Before I started today's flurry of blogs, I was uncharacteristically quiet: first I was at  an AMTSO event in San Mateo, then at RSA in San Francisco, and then in darkest Shropshire for reasons that won't interest you in the least.
I was planning to put up some news about the AMTSO workshop by now, but in … Read More…

While trying desperately to catch up with some email before flying out for the upcoming AMTSO workshop, I came upon a reference (tip of the hat to Rob Slade) to an article by Loren Grush about a "Supertrojan computer virus".
Despite my inevitable supersighs at terminology that confuses "Trojan" and "virus", this turns out not to … Read More…