The death of Osama bin Laden has gone viral, with blogs, social media and search engines pumping terabytes of rumor, innuendo and conspiracy theories at the speed of light, along with the occasional kilobyte of truth.  As the number of people searching for pictures and videos of bin Laden’s execution has skyrocketed, the criminal syndicates

[NOTE:  As we were publishing this articl, our Latin American office discovered another Black Hat SEO campaign incorporating promises of Osama bin Laden videos on Facebook.  Click here to view their article in Spanish. We will follow up on this shortly.  AG] The malware phenomenon started by the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death continues

The bad guys know you far too well. They know that all they have to do is say they have video footage of Bin Laden and many people will mindlessly click. As is always the case with any big news headlines, there are fake videos being posted with the intent of infecting your computer and

One of the most common ways to propagate malware through social engineering is to piggyback it on some attention-catching news event. This can be carried out using a variety of techniques and is certainly nothing new. One infamous example from 2007 was Win32/Nuwar (a/k/a the Storm Worm), which distributed through spam emails with current and/or

I've added some commentary and resources on the Japan earthquake/tsunami disasters to an independent blog I maintain that specializes in hoaxes, scams and so forth, but here are a few of the same resources that aren't already included in my recent blogs here on the topic: Analysis from Kimberley at stopmalvertising.com: http://stopmalvertising.com/blackhat-seo/recent-japanese-earthquake-search-results-lead-to-fakeav.html Guy Bruneau at Internet

As you'd expect, there have already been reports of Black Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) being used to lure people looking for news of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami onto sites pushing fake AV. (Stop me if you've heard this before…) My colleague Urban Schrott, however, offered some pretty good advice on what to look out

Since its release in 2007, ESET Smart Security has received many accolades for its antimalware, antispam and firewall functions.  However, we have recently been the recipient of a very dubious honor; a rogue antivirus program which masquerades as our own software. The Rogues Gallery Rogue antivirus is a loose family of programs that claim to

Here's another post from our colleagues in Spain (http://www.eset.es): mistakes in interpretation are down to me (David Harley). We have frequently talked about and shown examples of threats that take advantage of Black-Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This technique (BHSEO) is used by malware authors to position the malicious links in the top results when a potential

We're now seeing a fiercely concentrated Blackhat SEO campaigns exploiting the McAfee False Positive (FP) problem. Juraj Malcho, our Head of Lab in Bratislava, reports that in a Google search like the one I've screendumped above, he got three malicious hits in the top ten (the same ones captured here: of course, the malicious domain