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

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

Urban Schrott, IT Security & Cybercrime Analyst at ESET Ireland, reports seeing more e-mail pretending to be from Microsoft is circulating, "warning" computer users that "Conflicker" is again spreading rapidly. ESET's ThreatSense engine identifies the malware as Win32/Kryptik.CLU trojan, and running it would result in further malware infections. Here's an example Urban quotes of one

[Update: I notice that at about the same time that I posted this, Sophos also flagged a blog reporting a somewhat similar fake update for Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express (KB910721). The message is a lot different and links to a different site pretending to be Microsoft's update site, but is clearly not to be trusted. So the

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

Hard on the heels of the translated blog by Sebastián Bortnik that I posted at the weekend comes news from the Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/05/fraudulent_paypay_certificate_published/) of a bogus Paypal SSL certificate released yesterday exploiting a bug in Microsoft’s crypto API that has remained unpatched for more than two months, when Moxie Marlinspike (can I have a handle

In the AV industry, we’re not unaccustomed to security scare stories met with a debunking response. For example, Peter Norton was quoted in 1988 in Insight as saying that computer viruses were an urban myth, like the alligators supposed to inhabit the sewers of New York. (He did change his mind around 1990 when he gave

Our July ThreatSense.Net® report has been released today, and will eventually be available from the Threat Center page here. Most of the top ten entries are old friends: well, familiar names might be a better way of putting it. One of the disadvantages of having a scanner that makes heavy use of advanced heuristics is

I’d like to call your attention (again) to a major Adobe bulletin that was released yesterday (actually, still today, if you’re far enough behind GMT, but I’m sitting just a train ride away from Greenwich, UK). In brief, the bulletin concerns the following CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) issues: CVE-2009-1862 CVE-2009-0901 CVE-2009-2395 CVE-2009-2493 CVE-2009-1863 CVE-2009-1864 CVE-2009-1865

No, nothing to do with drive-by downloads… Our colleagues in Europe came up with a nice idea: an article on the dangers of web surfing on free wi-fi and some tips on staying safe. (A topic dear to the hearts of all of us who find ourselves out and about with our laptops from time