And a giant step for users! While working on a blog soon to follow this I discovered a behavior in Windows 7 that Microsoft has changed to make a small, but meaningful improvement in security. For decades the bane of IT professionals has been users who double click on anything they can. This has lead

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

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

[Part 2 of an occasional series, updating a blog series I ran in early 2009 to reflect changes in the threat landscape. This series will also be available shortly as a white paper.] Catch the Patch Batch Keep applications and operating system components up-to-date with automated updates and patches, and by regularly reviewing the vendors’ product

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

Update: there's more information on the Windows 7 exploit mentioned below in a Register article at http://reg.cx/1FcX. Update 2: I keep seeing references to this as a virus or worm. However, the code I've seen does not contain any self-replicative functionality. It's not even a Trojan, as such. Following an extract from one of my

The long awaited successor to Windows XP has been released? It’s Windows 7. What about Windows Vista? Well, to be frank, windows Vista is to the Windows family what DOS 4.0 was to the DOS family. For those of you who do not recall the DOS family line, DOS 4.0 was a bit of a

Microsoft’s advisory on the SMB driver issue is now available. As expected, it includes some comments on mitigation, but they’re rather fluffy. It advocates "Firewall best practices and standard default firewall configurations", which "can help protect networks from attacks that originate outside the enterprise perimeter,"  and suggests exposing a "minimal number of ports". Well, duh… I’d expect any firewall

Some traffic has crossed my radar concerning a 0-day exploit that apparently enables a remote attacker to crash a Vista or Windows 7 system with SMB enabled (and according to subsequent reports, Server 2008). The original post and exploit are claimed to demonstrate the possibility of a Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) and (normally) an automatic reboot when