ESET Threat Blog

ESET had quite a strong representation at Virus Bulletin this year in Barcelona, as David Harley mentioned in his post prior to the conference.
On the first day, Pierre-Marc Bureau presented his findings about the Kelihos botnet, David Harley and AVG’s Larry Bridwell discussed the usefulness and present state of AV testing, and to finish the … Read More…

On Saturday, another controversial report of a “government trojan” appeared. This time it is the German government that has been accused by the European hacker club Chaos Computer Club (CCC) of using “lawful interception” malware. Hence, “Bundestrojaner” (Federal Trojan), though that name is normally applied to the legal concept that allows German police to make … 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…

Barely had I blogged at (ISC)2 about the Proudhonist contention that “(Intellectual) Property is Theft” than I came upon an article by Andrew Orlowski for The Register in which he uses a similar tag line (“Property is theft, man. So we're taking yours”). While both articles are concerned with breaches of copyright and IP abuse, … Read More…

[Updated. Twice. ]
'Tis the season to get ready for the autumn round of security conferences. For me, it starts at the beginning of September with a small but perfectly formed Forensics conference at Canterbury Christ Church University, in the UK, where I'll be presenting on "Man, Myth, Malware and Multiscanning" – a presentation I'm … Read More…

I picked up a post today at bleepingcomputer.com about the “botnet 4.0 undetectable virus“, Well, you can probably guess what I think about the idea of an undetectable virus, and if not (and you actually care what I think about anything!) you can check out my blog Undetectable Virus Plays a Cool Hand.
(Clue: the Chainmailcheck blog … Read More…

OK, I realize that it looks a little self-obsessed to keep writing about comment spam relating to your own blog.
Actually, while I did write about it recently, on that occasion it was for SC Magazine's Cybercrime Corner. And that was largely because I'm still chuckling at the concept of a comment spammer complaining about the … Read More…

There is some pretty interesting content in ESET's Threat Report for July:

Urban Schrott talks about ESET Ireland's recent research into the ways in which people can recklessly aid and abet malware in compromising their own systems, by ignoring or bypassing AV protection.
David Harley (oh, that would be me…) summarizes some of the recent research coming … Read More…

I've been seeing a lot of wordage today about Dmitry Alperovitch's Shady Rat report, ranging from "Wow! Who knew?!" to "Nothing new here." Or, as Paul Wagenseil puts it, Don’t Believe the Hype: 'Operation Shady RAT' Is Nothing New. Well, "hype" is way too strong. There's some interesting stuff in the report. However, it's not startlingly … Read More…

A week or so ago we promised you a full paper expanding on our Hodprot is a Hotshot blog. That paper is now up on the white papers page at http://www.eset.com/us/documentation/white-papers.
Title: Hodprot: Hot to Bot
By: Eugene Rodionov, Aleksandr Matrosov, and Dmitry Volkov, August 2011
Abstract: A comprehensive analysis of Win32/Hodprot, one of the families of malware … Read More…