Bart Parys (@bartblaze) recently contacted me about research he was conducting into botnets, exploit kits and so on. His article "The Botnet Wars: a Q&A" is now up. While Bart himself is a Technical Support Engineer at Panda Security, he's taken the approach of asking a number of experts and commentators (I'll leave it to

As expected, Microsoft has released a critical out-of-band patch for the LNK shortcut file vulnerability which received attention last month. As a critical patch, this update will be delivered through Windows’ Automatic Update service, as well as being directly available for download from Microsoft’s site without a Windows Genuine Advantage check. A reboot is required for the

On July 17th, ESET identified a new malicious file related to the Win32/Stuxnet worm. This new driver is a significant discovery because the file was signed with a certificate from a company called "JMicron Technology Corp".  This is different from the previous drivers which were signed with the certificate from Realtek Semiconductor Corp.  It is

The hot news http://blog.eset.com/2010/07/17/windows-shellshocked-or-why-win32stuxnet-sux is of a zero-day vulnerability that has been used to attack SCADA systems. This comes hot on the heels of an article on the Wired web site titled “Hacking the Electric Grid – You and What Army” http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/hacking-the-electric-grid-you-and-what-army/. So clearly Wired had already predicted the origins, at least vaguely, of Win32/Stuxnet.

Further to Pierre-Marc's blog yesterday about in-the-wild exploitation of the Java Development Kit vulnerability publicised by Tavis Ormandy, David Kennedy has brought to our attention a comprehensive article on the same topic published yesterday by FireEye's Atif Mushtaq.  You may remember that Atif exchanged thoughts and info with us a while ago in relation to

September 2009 saw some key security analysis raining directly onto the Adobe PDF platform, particularly with SANS pointing towards remote code execution within PDFs as one of the top threat vectors: Adobe Acrobat, Reader, and Flash Player Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2009-1862) Adobe Reader Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2009-1493) Kudos to Adobe for patching these

While serving in the Marine Corps, one activity that I felt was effective in preparing both myself and my unit to be able to handle real-world scenarios, was getting as much experience as possible from military training exercises. In most cases multiple branches worked together or, as in the case with NATO exercises, multiple countries

I recently learned a new acronym: SODDI (Some Other Dude Did It). What this refers to is the defense that criminals routinely use (plausible deniability) – and even more so when it comes to illicit activities on the Internet. On Sunday, November 8th 2009 the Associated Press published an article regarding an individual that was

ESET released its Global Threat Report for the month of September, 2009, identifying the top ten threats seen during the month by ESET's ThreatSense.Net™ cloud.  You can view the report here and, as always, the complete collection is available here in the Threat Trends section of our web site.  While the report identifies a number

"Now may I suggest some of the things we must do if we are to make the American dream a reality. First, I think all of us must develop a world perspective if we are to survive. The American dream will not become a reality devoid of the larger dream of brotherhood and peace and