Archives - February 2009

Win32/Waledac for Valentine’s Day

As Valentine’s Day is approaching the criminals behind Win32/Waledac have increased their activity. The Valentine campaign started some time ago but the interesting part is only starting for us.  The Waledac botnet has been using fast flux for some time now.  This means that the IP addresses of the websites used to distribute this malware

Onward AMTSO

I may have mentioned the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization here before. ESET is an enthusiastic supporter of this initiative, and several members of the research and lab teams attended the meeting at the beginning of this week in Cupertino. Lots of interesting and stimulating discussion took place. The Review of Reviews Board (or Review Analysis

More on HIPAA is not privacy

Back in January I blogged about a shortcoming of HIPAA. HIPAA legislation is, in part, supposed to help protect our privacy when dealing with health care providers. Unfortunately there is a hole in the legislation that you can fly a Boeing 747 through. May of us have to log on to a web site to

Threat Trends In January

Here at ESET we have just released our Global ThreatTrends report for January 2009. Not surprisingly, at the top of the list is a family of programs that exploit Microsoft’s longest unpatched vulnerability. That’s right, Autorun.inf, is an evil “feature” that should have been patched out of existence a long time ago. Since it is

Get Your Stimulus Check!

As talk goes on in Washington DC about a 2009 Stimulus payment, the phisher are still trying to exploit the 2008 stimulus program. One such attack claims to be the secure way to get your stimulus payment. There was only one secure way to do that, and it was by going through the IRS. There

A Little Bit Different or “Google Got Bit”

When it comes to computers, there is no such thing as a little bit different. Consider the following. “0010 1111” is how a PC identifies a forward slash “/”. Each one and zero represents a bit. Eight bits, as you may know, is a byte.  0010 1110 is one little bit different from 0010 1111,