ESET Threat Blog

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…

While I share the reluctance of my colleagues to predict the future, I think there are some trends that can be classified as “reasonably likely to occur” in 2012. I make no promises, but here’s what I think we will see, in no particular order of importance or certainty.

We will see increased interest in digitally … Read More…

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…

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…

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…

Here's a diagnostic window that your shouldn't panic over, certainly if some cold-calling scammer directs you to it by persuading you to run a diagnostic on your own system.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
You might think I've blogged more than enough about support scams already – you know, where someone calls you out of the … 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…

Update: It seems like the initial article is inaccurate and that Paul Rellis never made any such comments about a 14 year old breaking into the X-Box live servers and have not offered to mentor him http://kotaku.com/5805742/microsoft-is-helping-an-xbox-live-hacker-develop-his-talent
TekGoblin reports (http://www.tekgoblin.com/2011/05/27/14-year-old-call-of-duty-hacker-hired-by-microsoft/) that a teenager who broke into the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 gameservers last month, … Read More…

It seems a little strange to have the words "Facebook" and "privacy" in the same sentence in one of my blogs, yet it seems that Facebook CTO Bret Taylor testified at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on mobile phone and internet privacy.
But it turns out the story is about rather more than privacy: it's about … Read More…

[An interesting snippet from my colleagues Aleksander Matrosov and Eugene Rodionov - DH]
Not so long ago, Microsoft released a security patch addressing the way Windows x64 operating systems check integrity of the loaded modules. In our recent report (The Evolution of TDL4: Conquering x64) we described a method used by the TDL4 bootkit to load … Read More…