Symantec’s transient false positive detection of Facebook as a malicious site leads to serious thoughts about Facebook and privacy…

The slides from an AMTSO-oriented presentation by Larry Bridwell and myself at this year's Virus Bulletin conference, on "'Daze of whine and neuroses (but testing is FINE)" are now available on the Virus Bulletin site are now available here (along with some other excellent presentations). The paper on which the presentation is based is on the ESET white papers

Sadly, Dennis Ritchie passed away today; there is a nice tribute to him here For anyone who ever learnt C programming back in school, you will, like me, probably have started out with the seminal text "The C Programming Language" written by Ritchie and Brian Kernigan. Ritchie was the co-creator of the C language –

News that the FBI has arrested the Florida man they suspect of criminally hacking into devices belonging to celebrities such as Scarlett Johansson and Christina Aguilera is welcome, definitely a win for law enforcement and society at large. But the good news comes with a warning. The technique used by the alleged perpetrator was to

…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…

ESET had quite a strong representation at Virus Bulletin this year in Barcelona, as David Harley mentioned in his post prior to the conference. On the first day, Pierre-Marc Bureau presented his findings about the Kelihos botnet, David Harley and AVG’s Larry Bridwell discussed the usefulness and present state of AV testing, and to finish

…this isn’t lawful interception, and it’s not surprising that the AV industry has seen no reason to avoid detecting it…

On Saturday, another controversial report of a “government trojan” appeared. This time it is the German government that has been accused by the European hacker club Chaos Computer Club (CCC) of using “lawful interception” malware. Hence, “Bundestrojaner” (Federal Trojan), though that name is normally applied to the legal concept that allows German police to make

In Europe, a user can make a request to an online company for all personal data they may have stored about them. One user did just that, and found 880 PAGES of data stored about him by Facebook! Other users listed on the Europe vs. Facebook website had even more. They include the usual data

October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month in America, which you probably know by now, what with President Obama's announcement and a whole host of related coverage from the Department of Homeland Security and other interested parties. Of course, one of the main messages of Cybersecurity Awareness Month is that we are all interested parties. When