I don’t really want to leave ESET, but IBM needs me. Several years ago Microsoft had a serious problem with viruses in its software. I was given the task of making it go away. It started with retail software. My job was to make sure none of the retail software Microsoft released was infected. Then

Autorun and Windows 7. Long time readers know that I think autorun was Microsoft’s longest unpatched vulnerability. For Windows 7 Microsoft has made some serious improvements, but for older versions of Windows Microsoft has ignored the obvious vulnerability and only offered the patch as an optional download instead of making it a critical update, as

I've noticed a number of tests recently that seem to be intended to prove that free antivirus is as good as commercial AV. As it happens, I'm not against free AV in principle, as long as people are entitled to use it – commercial use of free AV is usually not permitted. And I'm overjoyed when

You may have seen the news about the bot masters in Spain who were arrested. Defense Intelligence http://defintel.com/docs/Mariposa_Analysis.pdf dubbed this Mariposa botnet. It is claimed that this botnet had the power to perform much stronger attacks than what Estonia witnessed a couple of years ago.  Still, this botnet is dwarfed by the largest botnet in

These are a few questions relating to ESET's antivirus scanner for OS X, which is currently in beta, that I was asked in response to a post at Mac Virus. (If you want to take the beta out for a spin, you can still download it at http://beta.eset.com/macosx.) As these questions are very ESET-specific, I

It doesn't surprise me when someone says, like David Einstein of the San Francisco Chronicle, that there's no need for a Mac user to run anti-virus software. Though the most usual reason I see given is that there aren't any Mac viruses. (There are, but nowadays the main reason to run anti-malware on any platform

As our December ThreatSense report (now available at http://www.eset.com/threat-center/threat_trends/Global_Threat_Trends_December_2009.pdf) was not only the last of the year but the last of the decade, it's rather longer and more detailed than usual, including a look back at the last 12 months. I suppose we could have gone back over the whole decade, but I have to

OK, so I lied about not doing a top ten. Twice. For a paper that's going through the publication process at the moment, I revisited some of the ideas that our research team at ESET LLC came up with this time last year for a top ten things that people can do to protect themselves

The Register has reported that it cost Ealing Council, in London (UK) some £500,000 in lost revenue and repairs after a "virus infection" in May. According to El Reg’s John Leyden, the virus in question was Conficker-D, though because of differences in Conficker variant naming, it’s difficult to say exactly which variant that would refer to.

Microsoft has released the patches required to make autorun work with only CD and DVD drives. There is one little catch, a USB drive can be configured to look like a CD, but this patch definitely helps reduce risk. I highly recommend you install the patch so that you can connect most thumb drives, GPS