The federal government took much needed action today against sleazy PC tech support scammers and fake AV peddlers. Actions include lawsuits, a judgment of $163 million, and freezing of multiple assets. PC tech support scammers will be familiar to regular readers of this blog because David Harley and others have charted the progress of this

The threat of the Dorifel/Quervar malware spreading in the Netherlands is being used by telephone scammers to trick local PC users into paying for ‘protection’.

…I’ve been seeing quite a few scrawny, toothless piranha mailed from email addresses that are often spoofed but invariably dubious like google.phishing.team@a_latvian_mail_provider.com…

The MacDefender malware has morphed again, now taking the guise of "MacShield."   As in the case of its oldest sibling MacDefender, the MacShield variant has taken the name of a legitimate Mac OSX software product with small distribution, doubtless causing the real developer significant heartache. The UI is essentially unchanged, but as usual all

Security companies in general and, unfortunately, anti-malware companies in particular, are often accused of ‘hyping’ threats because of a perceived self-interest. However, in the main, legitimate vendors and researchers like those at ESET typically try to resist overhyping or playing up threats where possible, in favor of more balanced discussion that can help customers take

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

You may not be aware that ESET writers have been supplying blogs to SC Magazine for a while now. Recently, Randy Abrams and I were drafted in after the original contributors moved on, and we started contributing this week: Poachers and Gamekeepers considers whether there is a conflict of interest when AV companies work with

[Update: more information from ESET on this malware here.] Last October, my colleague Tasneem Patanwala blogged about rogue antivirus masquerading as an ESET product. In that instance it was a product calling itself Smart Security, and Tasneem's blog includes lots of useful information about that particular malware, and fake AV in general. Looking through my

Speaking of the October 2010 ThreatSense report, which includes an article on fake support and AV… A few days ago I wrote an article about fake support scams, a topic I've addressed before for Security Week – Fake AV, Fake Support  -and here on the ESET blog. What was missing, I guess, was that extra edge

Urban Schrott, IT Security & Cybercrime Analyst, ESET Ireland, contributed an article to ESET's July ThreatSense report about support scams. Since this is an issue that is still being under-reported, we thought it was worth reproducing, with the urbane Mr. Schrott's permission, on the blog. While we're on that topic, there's a video worth watching