How to Fool a Security Researcher
…Andrew Lee conducted a fun but disquieting thought experiment in the course of an amusing and informative presentation on user education at the recent Virus Bulletin Seminar…
Browsing author
…Andrew Lee conducted a fun but disquieting thought experiment in the course of an amusing and informative presentation on user education at the recent Virus Bulletin Seminar…
My colleague Urban Schrott, from ESET Ireland, wrote a nice feature article for our monthly ThreatSense report (which should be available shortly on the Threat Center page at http://www.eset.com/threat-center) on seasonal scams. As the scam season is starting to get into full swing, we thought it might be good to give it a wider audience here.
Our interim analysis of a version of the malware we detect as Java/Boonana.A or Win32/Boonana.A (depending on the particular component of this multi-binary attack) differs in some characteristics from other reports we’ve seen. The most dramatic difference is in the social engineering hook used in messages sent to an infected user’s friends list. Other reports
You may have seen some headlines today about a New Java Trojan that attacks Macs. It turns out that it also attacks Windows and Linux users as well. The Trojan pretends to be a video on Facebook. A user gets a message asking “is this you in this video” with a link. Upon clicking the
[C. Nicholas Burnett, the manager for ESET LLC’s tier three technical support, contributed the following guest blog article on the FireSheep plugin for Firefox. Thank you very much, Carl! Aryeh Goretsky] The past several days have seen the security community abuzz about a program presented in San Diego at ToorCon 12 this last weekend called
What a touching email. Mercy saw my profile and wants to know more about me. She even tells me “please don’t forget that distance or color does not mean any thing,but love matters a lot”. What a sweet sentiment. Now I’ll show you the email and I think you’ll see what’s wrong with this picture.
Sure, iPhones are a lot more stable than Androids, but there is one place that Android has it all over the iPhone… you get to know what resources an app can access before you install it. This capability, coupled with comments on apps can really help you make better decisions about what you install on
Back in the early 1990’s I had a 386 with 4 megabytes of RAM and a very large 80 megabyte hard drive. That little 386 could do something an Android phone cannot natively do. I could do a screen capture and save it to a file. I thought that for some of my blogs on
Surprised to find annual cybercrime damage spread somewhere between 300 million and 54 BILLION? So is the Director of National Intelligence. Today Brian Krebs of the Washington Post and Krebsonsecurity.com detailed a strong push for mandatory disclosure of cyber intrusion to include account hijacking and online identity theft.
In the first two parts (Part 1, Part 2) of this series I discussed some of the privacy issues associated with Flash and also explained the configuration options that Adobe offers. If you are willing to go through the hassle of creating an mms.cfg file and maintaining it then you really do have the ability
Now that cyberwarfare is out of the bottle, will anyone agree to not use it? In the summer of 1945 in New Mexico, the Trinity test gave rise to the term ground zero. Could Stuxnet may be measured as a definitive ground zero in cyberwarfare comparable to Trinity? Concerning Stuxnet’s latest rise in China, David
Since its release in 2007, ESET Smart Security has received many accolades for its antimalware, antispam and firewall functions. However, we have recently been the recipient of a very dubious honor; a rogue antivirus program which masquerades as our own software. The Rogues Gallery Rogue antivirus is a loose family of programs that claim to
Really – should any Alpha version be fed through a chipper-shredder like Diaspora has? The basics are simple: The basic premise behind Diaspora is that it will allow users to have social networking functionality similar to that offered by Facebook, but with far greater control over personal data. Diaspora was born earlier this year largely
…a piece at Discovery News about 5 Unexpected Threats of Online Social Networking…
In the security industry, we’re sometimes over-ready to be over-prescriptive, seeing security and privacy concerns as paramount where others see them as a distraction. And we’ve become used to the mindset that computer users will always prefer convenience to security.
Since never changing your password isn’t generally a realistic option, and some sites actually prevent you from using good passwords and, even better, passphrases, we’ve produced a number of articles and papers on the topic to help make it easier to follow good practice, even when your provider seems set on preventing it. Here they are as a list, to make it easier to follow.
I decided to download the card game Solitaire (by ZenTech Labs) on my Android based phone. Being a free app it is paid for by advertising. When you play the game there is always a banner ad at the bottom of the screen. One of the ads caught my eye. It said “Leslie2088 is .7
[UPDATE #1 at 12:15PM: Added more information about location of earthquake and prior scams. AG] We have just heard about the early September 4 (Saturday morning) earthquake near Christchurch, New Zealand, currently estimated at a Richter magnitude of 7.4. Our New Zealand distributor in Auckland is unaffected, but communications with the area are difficult. As with
In addition to recently getting a Droid 2, I purchased a Motorola H17txt Bluetooth headset. When used with a Blackberry or an Android based phone you can download and install an application called MotoSpeak that will read text messages and emails through the H17TXT. Before you go looking for such a headset be warned, there
You have to be a real cool cat to get into the Cambridge Who’s Who registry. A few months ago I received a spam message from whoswhopublication@gmail.com. A legitimate Who’s Who organization is very unlikely to be using a Gmail address and they wouldn’t have sent the email to AskESET. Here’s the email: You were
In my ever-widening circle of anti-cybercrime methodology this particular approach to attribution of the criminals looting the free world makes me particularly gleeful and I can’t wait to spread the good news: Security company HBGary today released an open source tool to digitally fingerprint malicious code and help identify the source of the malware. The