ESET Threat Blog

Since yesterday’s Much Ado About Facebook post in the ESET Threat Blog, we have written additional articles, received a few comments, and also received updated information on the “threat,” so it seems that now is a good time for a follow-up article.  Reports continue to come in of pornographic and violent imagery on Facebook, and … Read More…

Recently, a new data-stealing worm caught our attention. The reason why it stands out from many similar amateur creations is that its author is most probably Czech, as the text strings, variable and function names used by the malware suggest.

The Czech text above is displayed by the worm inside a console window and translates to: … 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…

Forensic software developer PassWare announced a new version of its eponymous software forensics kit on Tuesday. Already several news sources are writing about how the program can automatically obtain the login password from a locked or sleeping Mac simply by plugging in a USB flash drive containing their software and connecting it to another computer … Read More…

[Updated 21st January because when going back to check on something I'd said here, I noticed that I'd had a slip of concentration and said something so stupid, I'm not going to tell you what it was. ]
It was to be expected that there'd be a lot of media interest following the New York … Read More…

A recent story http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8180442/FBI-warns-Barbie-camera-could-be-used-by-paedophiles.html tells of a leaked FBI memo about the perils of a new Barbie doll. It appears that the new Barbie comes equipped with a web cam that can allow children to send videos of themselves across the net. The FBI, rightfully so, worries that this may be a weapon of pedophiles … Read More…

The hot news http://blog.eset.com/2010/07/17/windows-shellshocked-or-why-win32stuxnet-sux is of a zero-day vulnerability that has been used to attack SCADA systems. This comes hot on the heels of an article on the Wired web site titled “Hacking the Electric Grid – You and What Army” http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/hacking-the-electric-grid-you-and-what-army/. So clearly Wired had already predicted the origins, at least vaguely, of Win32/Stuxnet.
I … Read More…

[2nd update: added another batch of links for additional background.]
We were getting used to seeing some positives in the whole Autorun exploiting malware thing: while Microsoft remains equivocal about rolling out the patch that mitigates it to XP and Vista users, at least there’s a fair amount of information around about how you can disable … Read More…

In May it was reported that IBM handed out some USB drives that were infected. A month later I spoke at a security conference that I will not name. I gave the AV (audio/visual) technician a USB key with my presentation on it to copy to the laptop they were using for the presentations. About … Read More…

USB thumb drives, such as those pictured below from www.promotionalpro.com, are very popular marketing item, but oftentimes people are not aware of the digital risks these devices can present.

In recent years many USB devices have been sold or given way only to be found to be pre-infected from the factory. At a recent security conference … Read More…