Before I started today’s flurry of blogs, I was uncharacteristically quiet: first I was at an AMTSO event in San Mateo, then at RSA in San Francisco…

Zeus-associated malware (and that includes SpyEye and “SpyZeuS”) isn’t supernaturally difficult to detect. It is, however, pretty adaptive and has introduced, from time to time, some innovative counter-detection techniques.

The next AMTSO members meeting is getting pretty close… It's being held in San Mateo on the 10th and 11th February. More information, including the preliminary agenda, on the AMTSO meetings page. David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP ESET Senior Research Fellow

A recent report from Get Safe Online suggested that one in four people in the UK have received calls like this (based on a sample of 1500 adults), and my colleagues in Ireland tell me that their experience suggests comparable figures there.

At the last AMTSO workshop in Munich, a guidelines document on False Positive (FP) testing was approved, and is now available on the AMTSO documents page.

The AMTSO press release about its newly announced cheap subscription model, which I previously referred to here, has been misunderstood in some quarters. I therefore tried to clarify the issues in my latest Security Week article: Once More 'Round the AMTSO Wheel of Pain. The article is also linked from the ESET white papers page.

…one of the most interesting results is the approval by the members present of a planned low-fee subscription model which will enable individuals and small organizations to participate…

1) Another Virus Bulletin conference paper has just gone up on the ESET white papers page, by kind permission of the magazine. Large-Scale Malware Experiments: Why, How, And So What? by Joan Calvet, Jose M. Fernandez, our own Pierre-Marc Bureau, and Jean-Yves Marion, discusses how they replicated a botnet for experimental purposes, and what use they

By kind permission of Virus Bulletin, we’ve already put two of the papers written or co-authored by ESET researchers up on the White Papers page.

…quite a few other issues have come up that are less obviously related to AMTSO’s aims, and it’s probably inevitable that some of those concerns will find their way out in the course of the meeting. Watch this space.