Lots of fuss was made about the paper presented at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin yesterday by Alexander Sotirov et al. The paper describes a proof-of-concept attack using a weakness in the MD5 cryptographic hash function to create a rogue Cerification Authority certificate using a hash collision (essentially, two messages with the same MD5
Here’s the second instalment of the “ten ways to dodge cyberbullets” that I promised you. Keep applications and operating system components up-to-date with automated updates and patches, and by regularly reviewing the vendors’ product update sections on their web sites. This point is particularly relevant right now, given the escalating volumes of Conficker that we’re
We’re closing in on the end of 2008 and about to start 7D9, or 2009 for those who do not speak hex. I thought it might be a good time to remind you to change your passwords. There are some important things to remember about passwords. Despite the IT policies that are prevalent throughout the
It’s that time of year when everyone wants a top ten: the top ten most stupid remarks made by celebrities, the ten worst-dressed French poodles, the ten most embarrassing political speeches, and so on. Our research team came up with a few rather more serious ideas, most of which are considered at some length in our about-to-be-published
I’ve just picked up a comment to a previous blog that pointed to what I presumed to be a malicious URL. We’re grateful for all such information, but for obvious reasons, we won’t approve comments that point to malicious code! You can find information here about how to forward malware samples, malicious URLs or false positive
This is a sad item for Christmas Day morning. Castlecops have been making considerable efforts to fight crime on the Internet in many areas (surviving many an attack from the bad guys in the process) for a long time, but seem to have suspended the service on 23rd December. I hope there’s nothing more sinister
Yesterday, we started to receive reports of emails pretending to carry links to holiday cards. These emails contain a link that points to a file named ecard.exe. Of course, this executable is not a seasonal holiday card but malware. The reason this wave of malware has attracted our attention is that it is very similar
I promised you some more thoughts on the AVAR conference. Randy Abrams and I put together a paper on user education for the conference (it should be up on our White Papers page quite soon) about the argument between the two main camps in security thinking on the topic. You could sum it up as
Perhaps the most impersonated person in the world is Santa Claus. For Santa, Identity theft isn’t a problem, but for millions of consumers it is a real problem. There are some steps you can take to help prevent identity theft. That said, identity theft is not always preventable by the consumer. http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/idtheft/ is a good
It probably isn’t news to you that there’s been an issue with Internet Explorer and a recently-discovered vulnerability that exposes users of the application to a range of attacks. Certainly we’ve been getting lots of enquiries about our ability to detect it, and I suspect other vendors are getting the same barrage of questions. Of
Given our recent attempts to keep the blog flow more consistent, you might have noticed that we’ve been very quiet for the past couple of weeks. That has a lot to do with the fact that Randy Abrams and I have been in India for a meeting in Chennai, followed by the AVAR (Association of
An article on internetnews.com today caught my eye. “In Search of Smarter Phones” http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3788456 tells of capabilities being added to smart phones and new applications for these devices. With the release of ESET Mobile Antivirus this was of interest to me as currently there are few threats in the wild that attack the devices we currently
After seeing so many fake antivirus programs lately, it is interesting to take a look at other types of threats. Yesterday, we received an example of malware that tries to be very subtle about its installation process. The malware spreads through email. After infecting a computer, it will monitor the mailbox of its victim and
December’s Virus Bulletin includes a comparative test for a number of products on the Windows Vista x64 platform, giving us our 53rd VB100 award. To get a VB100, a product needs to detect all “In the Wild” viruses on-demand and on-access, with no false positives. Note that “In the Wild” here refers to replicative malware
You may be aware that in addition to our semi-annual global threat trends reports, we also do a monthly report. Much of this report is trend analysis based on data from our ThreatSense.Net threat tracking system. ThreatSense.Net® is an advanced threat tracking system which reports detection statistics from tens of millions of client computers around the
