%$^& is Fine for Cussing, But Not a Great Password

We’re closing in on the end of 2008 and about to start 7D9, or 2009 for those who do not speak hex. I thought it might be a good time to remind you to change your passwords. There are some important things to remember about passwords. Despite the IT policies that are prevalent throughout the

Fake Holiday eCards: Are You Surprised?

Yesterday, we started to receive reports of emails pretending to carry links to holiday cards.  These emails contain a link that points to a file named ecard.exe.  Of course, this executable is not a seasonal holiday card but malware.  The reason this wave of malware has attracted our attention is that it is very similar

Multi‑Layering and User Education: a random thought from AVAR

I promised you some more thoughts on the AVAR conference. Randy Abrams and I put together a paper on user education for the conference (it should be up on our White Papers page quite soon) about the argument between the two main camps in security thinking on the topic. You could sum it up as

Poor Santa

Perhaps the most impersonated person in the world is Santa Claus. For Santa, Identity theft isn’t a problem, but for millions of consumers it is a real problem. There are some steps you can take to help prevent identity theft. That said, identity theft is not always preventable by the consumer. http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/idtheft/ is a good

Smarter Smart Phones

An article on internetnews.com today caught my eye. “In Search of Smarter Phones” http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3788456 tells of capabilities being added to smart phones and new applications for these devices. With the release of ESET Mobile Antivirus this was of interest to me as currently there are few threats in the wild that attack the devices we currently

Hoax: “Life is beautiful”

When I get a chain letter like this, I don’t usually respond to everyone else who received it, even when it’s a hoax (as it usually is)…

Election Malware and Social Engineering

The election may be over, but the bad guys are still milking it, and there are lessons to be learned. I guess there’s nothing that brings out the worst in human nature like an election. There were all those chain letters, rumours and hoaxes about how various candidates were undesirable, un-American, immoral etc.  Then there were

Google Chrome May be the Wrong Choice

After having used the Google Chrome internet browser for a while now, I can say that it is generally a pretty nice browser, but I have some very serious privacy concerns.

Ongoing Web Infection

Last week, we had reports of a number of web sites being hacked and used to distribute malicious software.  The web sites are spread through various countries including Brazil, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, France, and of course the United States.  At the moment, it is hard to tell how the servers were compromised.  All of