If the smartphones of ESET bloggers are any indication, scams executed via SMS text, known as smishing or SMS phishing, are on the rise. I don’t do a lot of texting, which makes a smish easy to spot on my phone, but I just read an amazing statistic from a Pew report: Users 18 to

Spring is here and that means scam artists are thinking about income taxes and the IRS. Not that scam artists pay income taxes, they just know taxes and any mention of the IRS is a good way to get your attention, which explains a steady stream of deceptive emails targeting tax-paying Americans who now have

I was asked whether I'd seen SEO (Search Engine Optimization) poisoning relating to the Icelandic eruption and the very widespread grounding of aircraft in Europe. Well, there were certainly attempts in March to exploit the earlier Eyjafjallajokull eruption in order to drive googlers interested in finding out more towards malicious web sites. So it would be naive

We have discussed SEO poisoning extensively in the ESET Threat Blog, and it should come as no surprise to our readers that any topic which trends up quickly in search engine traffic will be exploited by the criminals who specialize in such activities.  The poisoned search term du jour is "erin andrews death threat".  Apparently,

The Apple iPad is the current gadget du jour amongst the digerati and has been seeing strong presales, with estimates as high as 150,000 units on the first day.  With such attention in the media and the blogosphere, it is no wonder that both legitimate businesses and scammers have taken to using it as bait

It has been a year since we last discussed fraudulent domain name registrar scams and we wanted to let people know that this scam continues unabated. In a nutshell, a message is sent to a publicly-visible email address listed on your website (sales, support, the CEO's office, a public relations contact, et cetera) from a

I recently learned a new acronym: SODDI (Some Other Dude Did It). What this refers to is the defense that criminals routinely use (plausible deniability) – and even more so when it comes to illicit activities on the Internet. On Sunday, November 8th 2009 the Associated Press published an article regarding an individual that was

There are some civilizations that revere their elders for their wisdom. Unfortunately, I don’t live in one of them.  In others, old people are quietly abandoned on icefloes or the sides of mountains when they start to take more from the community than they contribute towards it. I guess I’m reaching the age where I should

I’ve mentioned here before that targeted malware, often delivered by "spear phishing" carried by apparently "harmless" documents such as PDFs, .DOCs and spreadsheets rather than overt programs, can have much more impact than the raw numbers of such attacks suggest. In fact, some sources now use the term "whaling" rather than "spear phishing" to reflect the

A number of people have found my Twitter account and asked to "follow" me (that is, receive my micro-blog messages). I have it set up so that no-one can follow me unless I approve the request first, and since the account was set up specifically for work purposes, I normally only approve co-workers. Most of the others,