ESET’s threat researchers received a surprise earlier this week when they began receiving reports from ESET LiveGrid that downloads of ComboFix, a tool popular with advanced users for removing malware, were detected as being infected by a variant of the Sality virus, Win32/Sality.NBA.

I received a “shared” messages from a friend about “a leaked scandal video of Justin Bieber and Selana Gomez” promising a “naked Justin Bieber”, with a Photoshopped picture, which we – for family-friendliness – censored a bit.

Malware authors have a solid track record in regards to creative Command and Control protocols. We’ve seen peer-to-peer protocols, some custom (Sality), some standard (Win32/Storm uses the eDonkey P2P protocol).

In a story that could be lifted direct from a Hollywood script, a Japanese hacker placed a memory card on the collar of a stray cat found wandering on an island near Tokyo.

ESET has discovered a new version of the Delphi infector, Win32/Induc. Unlike its predecessors, however, this variant incorporates a seriously malicious payload and has acquired some extra file infection and self-replicative functionality. Two years ago, we published comprehensive information (here , here, and here) about the virus Win32/Induc.A, which infected Delphi files at compile-time. Though

…one Yasuhiro Kawaguchi was arrested yesterday on suspicion of “saving a virus on his computer,” though the story suggests distribution of malware too…

It's something of a truism, that 'old viruses never die', and that certainly seems to be the case for some of the older, more widespread, email worms. In this interview (http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041129/news_lz1b29five.html) back in 2004, I talked about an email worm called "Win32/Zafi.b" which, at the time, had recently been spreading on a global scale. However,

One of the (few) blessings of having been so long in this industry is that I remember a time when most malware was viral and Trojans were rare: so rare, in fact, that there was at one time a notorious "dirty dozen" set of Trojans.  At around the same time, there were innumerable hoaxes describing malware with

got a phone call from a gentleman with a pronounced accent wanting to help me with my virus problem … You didn’t know I had a virus problem? Neither did I, but he assured me that I was spraying malware all over the part of town I live and work in.

Zeus-associated malware (and that includes SpyEye and “SpyZeuS”) isn’t supernaturally difficult to detect. It is, however, pretty adaptive and has introduced, from time to time, some innovative counter-detection techniques.