UPDATE #1 Randy Abrams has posted a follow-up article, Anatomy of a Biting Bunny – The Infected Microsoft Catalog Update with additional information about how update services work, why they might distribute third-party code and what might be done to prevent malware from being distributed on services like Microsoft's Windows Update in the future.  7-FEB-2011.   Last

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

SC Magazine's Dan Raywood reports that "To be completely patched requires an average of between 51 and 86 actions per year", quoting findings by Secunia that " in order for the typical home user to stay fully patched, an average of 75 patches from 22 different vendors need to be installed, requiring the user to

There is a vulnerability in Internet Explorer that Microsoft will patch tomorrow. Normally Microsoft releases patches on the second Tuesday of each month, but in the case Microsoft is making the patch available much sooner. The most probable reason for the “out of band” patch is that this vulnerability received a ton of attention as

There has been quite a lot of traffic in the last few weeks about the doc.media.newPlayer vulnerability referenced in the CVE database as CVE-2009-4324. The following Adobe articles refer: http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/apsa09-07.html http://blogs.adobe.com/psirt/2009/12/new_adobe_reader_and_acrobat_v.html http://blogs.adobe.com/psirt/2009/12/security_advisory_apsa09-07_up.html Today's article at the Internet Storm Center by Bojan Zdrnja (http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7867) gives a lot of detail on a particularly inventive exploit of the

[Part 2 of an occasional series, updating a blog series I ran in early 2009 to reflect changes in the threat landscape. This series will also be available shortly as a white paper.] Catch the Patch Batch Keep applications and operating system components up-to-date with automated updates and patches, and by regularly reviewing the vendors’ product

I recently received a question at askeset@eset.com that I think maybe of interest to more than just the author. I read an interesting article written by Kaspersky Lab titled "Drive-by Downloads.  The Web Under Siege" and have a question I was hoping you could answer. (I have included a link to the article below.)  Are

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

A report from SANS concludes that security professionals may not be paying attention to some of the biggest threats out there today. Not terribly long ago the Windows operating system was the attack target of the bad guys. There were tons of exploitable vulnerabilities and they were heavily exploited. Since that time Microsoft has put