In a previous blog relating to Acrobat vulnerabilities, I suggested that you might want to sign up for Adobe’s alerts service. I did, but still haven’t received any news from it. However, it appears that The Register (or one of its sources) did, so I’m nevertheless aware that Adobe has released updates to address the

Someone raised an interesting point in a comment to yesterday’s blog about Symantec’s own PIFTS.EXE being flagged by their own firewall as a possible problem. Let me quote the comment in full. I by no means buy into the super root-kit routine, I do however think that there will be copy cats (if not already)

PSST! Anyone remember the Telephone party game, also known by various politically incorrect names like Chinese Whispers and Russian Scandal? A series of reports like this and this illustrate a textbook example of how rumour and misunderstanding (some of it probably wilful) can transform a story into something very different to its original form. According

From time to time the discussion of whether or not there are (or can be) good worms comes up, usually specifically in the context of program maintenance, updates and upgrades. In fact, the idea of maintenance viruses goes back at least as far as Dr. Fred Cohen, who pretty much "wrote the book" on early

It appears there are interesting developments in the Conficker/Downadup development front. Peter Coogan of Symantec describes here a variant that doesn’t appear to be interested in infecting new machines, rather more so in updating and protecting itself on systems already infected with previous variants. (And, yes, ESET’s ThreatSense technology does already detect it heuristically!) It seems to have

As The Register has pointed out, the Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for March 2009 doesn’t mention a forthcoming patch for the Excel vulnerability we’ve already flagged in this blog here and here and here. Since, as John Leyden remarks, the exploit is being actively exploited, it may seem that Microsoft are not taking the issue seriously

Here’s something I haven’t noticed before (but then I don’t pay nearly as much attention to phishing messages as I used to, owing to the need to sleep occasionally). I’ve started to receive messages purporting to be from the Alliance and Leicester, in the UK. The messages are much the same, apart from the Subject

I’ve been asked several times in the past few months about links between the global recession and criminal activity, especially as related to fraud. There are, of course, those who claim that the economic situation is directly caused by "criminal" activity by politicians and banks, which is a little further than I’d care to go personally. What

A reminder about about the Acrobat reader vulnerability we blogged about several times recently (http://www.eset.com/threat-center/blog/?p=593, http://www.eset.com/threat-center/blog/?p=579, http://www.eset.com/threat-center/blog/?p=572). Remember I said "As we’ve said previously, disabling JavaScript, while it doesn’t address the underlying vulnerability, stops known exploits from working properly"? Predictably, there are now known exploits that don’t use the JavaScript heap spray trick. While I’m

OK, I bet you think I am making this up, but this is real. The Tits alternative is a theorem by an award winning Belgian mathematician named Jacques Tits. According to Wikipedia:  “In mathematics, the Tits alternative, named for Jacques Tits, is an important theorem about the structure of finitely generated linear groups. It states