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The death of Osama bin Laden has gone viral, with blogs, social media and search engines pumping terabytes of rumor, innuendo and conspiracy theories at the speed of light, along with the occasional kilobyte of truth. As the number of people searching for pictures and videos of bin Laden’s execution has skyrocketed, the criminal syndicates
[NOTE: As we were publishing this articl, our Latin American office discovered another Black Hat SEO campaign incorporating promises of Osama bin Laden videos on Facebook. Click here to view their article in Spanish. We will follow up on this shortly. AG] The malware phenomenon started by the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death continues
Not using Twitter or Facebook is, in these times, akin to not owning or using a mobile ‘phone. Last night’s events – the reported death of Osama Bin Laden – proved that we are well and truly in the Twitter era (Twitter reported that over 4000 tweets per second were made immediately preceding the President’s
Yesterday the U.S. president, Barak Obama, held a conference at the White House to announce that the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan. With no doubt, this is a story with an international impact, which the people will remember in the coming days and… attackers as well. As expected,
As I have blogged about the Android platform a recurring comment has been “When will ESET have protection for my Android?” Well, I still don’t know when it will be available for sale, but for those who understand the risks involved with running beta software, have backed up all of their data on their Adnroid
The US Department of Justice’s announcement yesterday of the takedown of the command and control (C&C) servers for the Coreflood bots (detected by ESET as Win32/AFCore) and seizure of their domains marks another step in the growing awareness that crime, whether it is committed with bullets or with botnets, is still crime. This particular botnet,
Here’s a little information from ESET’s point of view about the Coreflood botnet, whose C&C (Command and Control) servers were taken down yesterday by the Department of Justice. The Coreflood bot is detected by ESET products as Win32/Afcore and has been active since the early years of the last decade (certainly since 2001), though our
Many Facebook users are annoyed to discover that their names and faces can be used in sponsored FB ads. Indeed, according to Dan Tynan in IT World, the next phase will to allow 3rd-party advertisers to do the same thing inside Facebook apps. I’m not a great fan of the FB principle of all your
One that will be of most interest to our readers in the UK, I guess. Our friends at Virus Bulletin are holding another “Securing Your Organization in the Age of Cybercrime” seminar, this time on the Open University Campus at Milton Keynes on the 24th May. The full agenda is already available on that page, and
I’ve added some commentary and resources on the Japan earthquake/tsunami disasters to an independent blog I maintain that specializes in hoaxes, scams and so forth, but here are a few of the same resources that aren’t already included in my recent blogs here on the topic: Analysis from Kimberley at stopmalvertising.com: http://stopmalvertising.com/blackhat-seo/recent-japanese-earthquake-search-results-lead-to-fakeav.html Guy Bruneau at Internet
…today I’m waxing nostalgic about a piece of malware. Not one of those anniversaries that have filled so many blogs, articles and videos recently (happy birthday, dear Brai-ain….), but something that just popped into my mailbox…
Added 5th March 2011 to the Stuxnet resources page at http://blog.eset.com/?p=5945…
…all the relevant malware they’ve seen uses exploits that are restricted to Android OS 2.2 and below…
Social Security Numbers: Identification is STILL not Authentication…
At a time when Gartner estimates that we’ll have downloaded 17.7 billion + mobile apps worldwide by the end of this year, I couldn’t help thinking that Android users are likelier to pay for lax screening in the Android Market than users who are protected by reasonably strict application whitelisting.
Well, it looks like that concern had some justification. There are a spate of stories today about >50 applications pulled from the Android Market
Aryeh Goretsky posted a blog about a trojan program in a Microsoft catalog update. I thought it might be a little interesting to know how this can happen and why it doesn’t happen more often. As it turns out, it was once my job to make sure that Microsoft did not release infected software. Initially
UPDATE #1 Randy Abrams has posted a follow-up article, Anatomy of a Biting Bunny – The Infected Microsoft Catalog Update with additional information about how update services work, why they might distribute third-party code and what might be done to prevent malware from being distributed on services like Microsoft’s Windows Update in the future. 7-FEB-2011. Last week, we
Just a quick follow up on the Microsoft Security Advisory (2501696) post that my colleague Randy Abrams wrote about on January 28th regarding Microsoft’s recent MHTML vulnerability, which is listed by ESET as HTML/Exploit.CVE-2011-0096.A in our signature database. Although reports remain low so far, any vulnerability in a particular version of Microsoft Windows
A recent article at http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/1/20/android-trojan-captures-credit-card-details/#ixzz1Bb8RGsWS describes how an attack against Android based phones might be able to capture your credit card information even when you speak it into the phone. The interesting thing about this proof of concept is not that the application can capture voice details, but rather that it uses a second application
…many scams work by panicking victims into taking some unwise action, whether it’s parting with their credit card details or opening a malicious program, claiming that some problem or illegal action is associated with their computer or IP address, such as transmitting malware or visiting paedophile or other pornographic sites…
…”It” is a ZDNet article – well, more like a slide show – by Zack Whittaker, called January 2011: The Definitive Facebook Lockdown Guide…