Since I’ve just spent several days at a major conference, you might have expected a flurry of blogs about it. And indeed, there’s a lot more I hope to say about VB 2009, but I’ve been beset by a number of other issues that have demanded my attention, in and out of the blogosphere.  I did rather hope

Virus Bulletin 2009 is now in full swing, though meetings and other issues have kept me from seeing as much as I’d like. Still, excellent opening and keynote speeches, and a very interesting talk on cyber-insurance from Pascal Lointier. (A bit of a first for me: though I’ve been attending VB most years since 1996 and

Bonjour mes amis! Well, I am in Switzerland, and very close to the French border, for the Virus Bulletin conference – perhaps the most eagerly anticipated event in the anti-malware researcher’s calendar. How sad is that? I also thought you might like to further extend your French skills on an article here, about a presentation

Randy’s post yesterday about putting an "In Case of Emergency" (ICE) prefix in front of one or more entries in the contact list on your cellphone rang a particular bell (sorry!) with me. I first came across the idea around 2005, when the idea was first launched by the East Anglian Ambulance NHS Trust in

One of the more interesting things to happen to me in the past few months – well, that I’m going to talk about in public – is that I was elected to the Board of Directors of AMTSO (The Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization). Interesting and scary: the first couple of months have seen me at

Further to yesterday’s blog at http://www.eset.com/threat-center/blog/2009/08/03/slideshare-used-to-spread-malware, I hear from  Sebastián Bortnik that the account holder that posted those malicious slides to Slideshare has been banned, and the slide decks are no longer available. However, he (the black hat, not Sebastián!) had managed to post 2,473 slides with malicious links before he was stepped on: see

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

Alex makes a couple of interesting points in his comment on Randy’s blog yesterday about Microsoft’s "Security Essentials" antivirus (as does Randy, of course, but there’s no surprise there.) Alex is suggesting, I think, that Security Essentials isn’t so much a freebie as a value-add to something you’ve already paid for (i.e. Windows). That’s a pretty interesting,

Microsoft is releasing a beta of their new antivirus product. Previously Microsoft announced that they would discontinue OneCare. The choice of the name “Security Essentials” is amusing. I’m not in the camp of those who think that you can’t have “Microsoft” and “security” in the same sentence, but just the same, Microsoft does say “If