ESET Threat Blog

 Here are some further thoughts arising from the ACPO National Cyber Crime Conference held recently in the UK*.

DAC Janet Williams, ACPO’s e-Crime lead, summarized the current initiatives along these lines (apologies if I’ve introduced too many of my own preconceptions):

The UK intends to tackle cybercrime and make this one of the safest places to do … Read More…

Scam artists and cybercriminals are looking to turn romance into profit now that Valentine's Day approaches, possibly taking over your computer in the process. According to ESET researchers in Latin America, we can expect the quest for love to be leveraged as an effective social engineering ploy to enable the bad guys to infect unsuspecting … 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…

I want share with you what ESET Latin America’s Research team thinks will be the main trends in malware and cybercrime in 2012. In our office it is usual to produce an analysis of emerging trends in a year-end report and so, in keeping with recent postings by my ESET colleagues, I present a summary … Read More…

If you're a dedicated follower of Facebook, last week was a bit of a roller coaster. On Monday, Emil Protalinski at ZDNet reminded you that the stories appearing on Facebook about Lady Gaga being found dead in a hotel room are a “likejacking” scam. Then on Tuesday it was reported that Facebook has "introduced a … Read More…

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…

[In their presentation “Cybercrime in Russia: Trends and issues” at CARO2011 -- one of the best presentations of the workshop, in my unbiased opinion -- Robert Lipovsky, Aleksandr Matrosov and Dmitry Volkov mentioned the Win32/Hodprot malware family, which seems to be undergoing something of a resurgence. But why don’t I let them tell you ... Read More…

Over the past couple of years rogue online pharmacies have been advertising their domains on search engines and promoting themselves through search engine optimization.  Legitimate pharmaceutical companies have their own measures in place to work on taking these sites offline.  The problem with rogue online pharmacies is that they do not meet federal regulations.  To … Read More…

In an unfortunate series of events related to the RSA SecurID technology, reports are coming in that Lockheed Martin's networks have been broken into by unknown perpetrators.  Jim Finkle and Andrea Shalal-Esa broke an exclusive story and reached out to folks in the industry to get to the truth.

"They breached security systems designed to keep … 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…