Education? Academic background in modern languages, social sciences, and computer science.
Highlights of your career? I was a late starter (1986) as an IT professional, beginning at the Royal Free Hospital, then with the Human Genome Project (1989), then at Imperial Cancer Research Fund (1991-2001), where I wrote/co-wrote/edited a number of Internet FAQs and my first articles on programming and security. I presented my first conference papers in 1997 (at Virus Bulletin and SANS). In 2001 Osborne published Viruses Revealed (co-written with Robert Slade and Urs Gattiker): VR and the later AVIEN Malware Defense Guide (Syngress) – to which Andrew Lee also contributed – are probably the best known of my books. When I rejoined the UK’s National Health Service in 2001, I ran the Threat Assessment Centre and was the go-to person nationally for malware issues. I left to work as a freelance author and consultant in 2006, which is also when I began to work with ESET.
Position and history at ESET? Senior Research Fellow at ESET N. America. Primarily, I’m an author and blogger, editor, conference speaker, and commentator on a wide range of security issues. Like the rest of the industry, they put up with me because I’ve been around so long.
What malware do you hate the most? Malware is just code. It’s malicious people I detest. While I’ve no love of scammers, I can see that it’s easier to be honest in a relatively prosperous environment – if there is such a thing anymore – and that cybercrime can be driven by an economic imperative. But I have nothing but contempt for those sociopaths who cause harm to others for no reason except that they can.
Favorite activities? The guitar (I still gig and record when time allows), other people’s music. I love opera but don’t attempt to sing it. Photography, art, poetry, country walking – well, ambling is about as much as I can manage at my age – good food and wine, good television when I can find it...
What is your golden rule for cyberspace? Scepticism is a survival trait: don’t assume that anything you read online is gospel truth, even this adage.
When did you get your first computer and what kind was it? Amstrad PCW (primarily a word-processor) in 1986. What else would you expect a not-very-rich author to buy in 1986? :)
Favorite computer game/activity? Extra-curricular writing (blogging, verse and lyrics, articles). Digital photography and miscellaneous artwork.
[Update: it seems that people who missed the whole MS-DOS/having fun with the C> prompt and batchfiles thing are still struggling with the fact that vendors are releasing cleaning tools that are really command-line tools, so some step-by-step notes are added below.] I’m sure you’re almost as bored with this issue as I am with the
This wouldn’t normally be the place to discuss the ongoing decline of the fortunes of the British Government, but there have been several IT-security-related stories coming out of the Mother of Parliaments worth a closer look. Back on March 10th, The Register reported that MP (Member of Parliament) Alun Michael had reported to the police that he
Responding to a request for information about phishing and malware distribution mechanisms this morning, I happened upon a link on the Anti-Phishing Working Group site to the Silver Tail blog The site has been running a series of blogs on “Online Fraud from the Victim’s Perspective”. Author Laura Mather tells the story of two victims,
I don’t, of course, know for sure what’s going to happen on April 1st, when Conficker is timed, potentially, to go to its next stage of evolution. We do know, from inspecting code in the variants and subvariants that have come our way, that infected machines will be looking for instructions and updates on that date. At the very least,
There are quite a few reports currently about particularly ugly development son the fake AV front. The Register’s John Leyden has referred to a “double dipping” attack, in which the notorious Antivirus 2009 is implicated in an attack that goes beyond offering useless rogue anti-malware to inflicting actual damage on user data files, in order to force the victim
Well, I’ve still had no information about updates to address the recent Acrobat vulnerability/exploits to either of the addresses I subscribed to Adobe’s Security Notification Service. However, the RSS feed here does work. Which is how I know that Acrobat Reader 9.1 and 8.1.4 for Unix were released yesterday, right on time. As expected, these address the
I just picked up a comment made today on a post Randy made about the comparative security of Macs and PCs. Since the original post goes back to 2006, it seems a pity to bury the comment on a page most people won’t get to. In fact, since the comment reproduces an article in PC
The BBC published a self-justification of sorts over the Click fiasco on Friday 13th March: when I came upon it the following morning, I posted a comment there, pointing out Mark Perrow had addressed the issues this industry hadn’t complained about, and ignored the issues that we were concerned about. My comment is number 14,
As we’ve mentioned here before, fake antimalware problems are a serious problem, both to the real security industry and to our customers. So it’s good to hear of action being taken against some of miscreants involved: more specifically, the takedown of the resurrected Traffic Converter site, a major player in the distribution of this particular form
DroneBL, a site that tracks IP addresses that considered vulnerable to abuse that some sites use for its DNSBL (blocking list), blogged yesterday on the fact that it’s been subjected to a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS), apparently by systems infected with malware going by the name of psyb0t. According to the blog, this
Well, Adobe are still not speaking to me: I’ve had no information about updates to address the recent Acrobat vulnerability/exploits to either of the addresses I subscribed to its Security Notification Service. (See PPPS below.) However, something positive is happening out there in the old clay homestead: updates have arrived for a machine on which
Virus Bulletin have announced the results of a trial run of its new anti-spam product testing, where one product scored platinum, two scored gold, and two scored silver, based on their average scores in the test. However, you won’t actually get to know which products they were on this occasion: quite rightly, VB has anonymised the results
[Updated after further investigation.] For the past few days, I’ve been seeing spam to one of my accounts offering me various bits of software. Nothing unusual about that, of course, but this one was better constructed than usual, and consistent, and I made a mental note to look more closely when I’m a little less
Further to our previous blog about the use of TinyURL to obscure malicious links, a family member drew my attention to a problem she was having with the TinyURL site. Every time she tried to access a TinyURL link, she got a page advertising security products. (She was using their free firewall.) It turned out, though, that this
The Tech Herald have brought it to our attention that Comodo, a security company who include an antivirus product in their range, have backed the BBC’s action in buying and exploiting a botnet for the Click programme’s story. This is clearly swimming against the tide – virtually all the mainstream anti-malware companies who’ve commented have
There was a comment posted today on an article on the SC Magazine site from someone who seemed to think we were talking up an obsolete exploit. He seems to have been thinking about this one: “Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-014 – Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Excel Could Allow Remote Code Execution (949029)”. (Which fixes this issue,
Just a reminder that we can’t usually handle support issues here. Not that we want to be unhelpful, but the Research team simply isn’t resourced for that sort of work. Someone just posted a problem they had with V.4 here, and I mailed them back, but the message bounced, so I’ll summarize here. As it
And still the controversy rages: several people have pointed out that it’s unlikely that the PCs in the BBC’s botnet are all in the UK, suggesting that there could be additional legal issues relating to other jurisdictions. The H reiterated the point that Ofcom regulations state that payment shouldn’t be made to “convicted or confessed
Oh, no, I hear you say, not another hoax? Not exactly. Not directly connected with chain letters, anyway. But if you do happen to share my fascination with 20th/21st century mythmaking, you might be amused for a minute or two by a quiz here addressing the truth or falsehood of some common myths Depressingly, given my
A number of people have found my Twitter account and asked to “follow” me (that is, receive my micro-blog messages). I have it set up so that no-one can follow me unless I approve the request first, and since the account was set up specifically for work purposes, I normally only approve co-workers. Most of the others,
