ESET Threat Blog

We have just completed fresh analysis of the malicious software known as Win32/Festi. While the "Festi" botnet created with this malware has been in business since the autumn of 2009 we can see that the software is frequently updated, as described in our analysis, and these updates mean Festi continues to be a potent threat … 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…

The biggest Mac botnet ever encountered, the OSX/Flashback botnet, is being hit hard. On April 12th, Apple released a third Java update since the Flashback malicious code outbreak. This update includes a new tool called MRT (Malware Removal Tool) which allows Apple to quickly push malware removal code to their user base. The first mission … Read More…

Earlier this month, researchers from AlienVault and Intego reported a new malware attack targeting Tibetan NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations). The attack consisted of luring the victim into visiting a malicious website, which then would drop a malicious payload on the target’s computer using Java vulnerability CVE-2011-3544 and execute it. The webserver would serve a platform-specific JAR … Read More…

Yesterday’s announcement by the US Department of Justice that the operators of file-sharing site Megaupload had been indicted for operating a criminal enterprise that generated over $175 million by trafficking in over half a billion dollars of pirated copyrighted material has sent shockwaves across the Internet.  The accuracy of those figures may be questionable, but … 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…

The TDSS botnet, now in its 4th generation, is seriously sophisticated malware, which is why we've spent so much time writing about it: the revision of the paper The Evolution of TDL: Conquering x64 that will be up on the white papers page shortly runs to 54 pages and includes some highly technical analysis, including the detail on … Read More…

[News from my colleagues in Russia, Aleksandr Matrosov and Eugene Rodionov.]
Recently, we had a stroke of luck: our TDL tracker picked up a brand new plugin for TDL4 kad.dll (Win32/Olmarik.AVA) which we haven’t seen previously. It took some time to find out what it is intended to do. After some preliminary analysis we discovered that … Read More…

Android Smartphones are under attack again by rogue applications that once installed are reading information from the phone and sending it back to a pre-assigned location. According to mobile security firm as many as 120,000 users may have been infected from a cafeteria selection of at least two dozen applications from the Android Market.

“Once installed, … Read More…

One of the (few) blessings of having been so long in this industry is that I remember a time when most malware was viral and Trojans were rare: so rare, in fact, that there was at one time a notorious "dirty dozen" set of Trojans. 
At around the same time, there were innumerable hoaxes describing malware with some … Read More…