ESET Threat Blog

Do you use Google? These days the question sounds almost absurd. If you use the Internet, or an iPhone, or an Android phone, or a Kindle or an iPad, then of course you use Google in some shape or form. And if you take a keen interest in how your personal information is used, you … Read More…

Introduction
Mobile World Congress 2012 is almost upon us, and one of the most hotly-anticipated topics is the next generation of Microsoft’s smartphone operating system Windows Phone 8, which has been kept under wraps far more tightly than its PC counterpart, Windows 8.
While Microsoft was an early adopter in the creation of smartphones with Windows Mobile, … Read More…

Tomorrow, on January 18, 2012, dozens of popular websites covering a diverse range of subjects will be blacking out their home pages in protest of the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).  Some of these websites are well-known, such as the English language web site for the encyclopedic Wikipedia and quirky news site Boing Boing, … Read More…

SOPA as currently constructed can never work as intended. I'm not going to get into the reasons we don't like it because of its oppressive implications or because it is against our first amendment rights nor for any other reason (there's been so much other commentary on those issues that it would be superfluous). I … Read More…

Scam artists and cyber-criminals welcomed today's news of the demise of Libyan leader Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi (often referred to as simply Gaddafi or Gadhafi). Why? Because few events fuel Internet search activity as much as the death of a famous–or infamous–person, although celebrity weddings and divorces are also a big search driver. It's a … Read More…

Well, yes, that title is from a song by John D. Loudermilk, written with some (possibly accidental) prescience way back in 1962. Given the aggravation that 21st century phishing causes Google users, perhaps it's time for a new song dedicated to that particular pastime. In the meantime, I thought I'd mention a shoal of the … Read More…

Google researchers have recently released a rather interesting paper on Trends in Circumventing Web-Malware Detection, and several people have been asking me about it (or rather, the blog that announced it).
Read the full paper, folks! There's a lot more in there than the "cloaking" stuff, though if you're not a specialist, you may find some … Read More…

A little while ago, one of my Facebook friends mentioned that his Google+ account had been suspended because his name breached community standards. Probably, I suggested, because his name was the same as a character in a Star Trek movie, and it was flagged as pseudonymous. 
Looks as if I was probably correct. Or someone over … Read More…

My Russian colleagues Aleksandr Matrosov and Eugene Rodionov report that recently a cybercrime group called “Ready to Ride” has attracted their attention, by distributing malware of the Win32/Cycbot family. This group started in the fall last year, judging from the domain name registration date – readytoride.su was registered on 8th September 2010.
Its primary activities were … Read More…

Too bad it doesn’t exist. I mean really exist. Here is how an anti-phishing day that is designed to be a highly effective educational deterrent to phishing would work.
Google, Facebook, Hotmail, Yahoo, Twitter, Myspace, Banks, Online Gaming sites, such as World of WarCraft, and others would all send phishing emails to their users. Yes, phishing … Read More…