David Harley | WeLiveSecurity

Bio

David Harley

David Harley

Senior Research Fellow

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.

Articles by author

Scams Tech Support Scams: Second Byte at the Cherry

Tech Support Scams: Second Byte at the Cherry

Is there really anything new to be said about tech support scams? Unfortunately, the FTC tells us there is. Not only because people are still falling prey to this type of fraud, but because the scammers are still finding new approaches to harvesting their victims’ credit card details. Some quite interesting, sophisticated technical tricks are

Opinion 2013: a View to a Scam

2013: a View to a Scam

There are plenty of scams effective enough to rate a warning or three, in the hope of alerting potential victims to the kind of gambit they use. And so, even though much of ESET’s business is focused on the bits and bytes of malicious software, I’ve spent a lot of time writing on WeLiveSecurity and

Malware The Death of Anti‑Virus: conference paper

The Death of Anti‑Virus: conference paper

Death of a Sales Force: Whatever Happened to Anti-Virus? is a paper written by Larry Bridwell and myself for the 16th AVAR conference in Chennai, which was kindly presented by ESET’s Chief Research Officer Juraj Malcho, as neither Larry nor myself were able to attend the conference in the end. The paper is also available

Opinion Phear of Phishing

Phear of Phishing

(All four blog articles in this series, of which this article is the last, are available as a single paper here: The_Thoughtful_Phisher_Revisited.) From the sort of ‘visit this link and update or we’ll cancel your account’ message that we saw in the previous blog in this series (The Less Thoughtful Phisher), it’s a short step

phish The Less Thoughtful Phisher

The Less Thoughtful Phisher

Less innovative than the scam mails described in my previous articles (Phish to phry  and The Thoughtful Phisher II), there are those phish messages that suggest a problem with your account that they need you to log in to fix. (Of course, you aren’t really logging in to a legitimate site.) Mostly their appeal is

phish The Thoughtful Phisher II

The Thoughtful Phisher II

In the previous Thoughtful Phisher blog, we looked at some visual clues that should tip you off that a email from a ‘bank’ is not to be trusted. Just as interesting here, though, is the variety of social engineering gambits used by this wave of phish campaigns. It’s worth taking a closer look at some

phish Phish to phry: The Thoughtful Phisher Revisited…

Phish to phry: The Thoughtful Phisher Revisited…

[A much shorter version of this article appeared in the October 2013 Threat Radar Report as ‘The Thoughtful Phisher’. As these particular scam/spam campaigns don’t seem to be diminishing, however – indeed, some of the phishing techniques seem to be getting more sophisticated – I thought perhaps it was worth updating and expanding for a

Scams Tech Support Scammers: Talking to a Real Support Team

Tech Support Scammers: Talking to a Real Support Team

It so happens that I live over 5,000 miles from the ESET North America office in San Diego, and so tend not to have water cooler conversations with the people located there. Of course, researchers working for and with ESET around the world maintain contact through the wonders of electronic messaging, but there are lots

Scams Tech support scam update: still flourishing, still evolving

Tech support scam update: still flourishing, still evolving

[Update 30th October 2013: with regard to the ping gambit discussed below, please note that protection.com now responds to ICMP echo requests – in other words, if you now run the command “ping protection.com” you should now see a screen something like this: Note that this is perfectly normal behaviour for a site that responds

How To Comment/No Comment: a word about blog comments

Comment/No Comment: a word about blog comments

After taking quite a long break from comment moderation on the WeLiveSecurity blog, I’ve recently started receiving comment notifications and have therefore been able to moderate some of the comments that have I’ve seen, and I thought it was worth passing on some thoughts about the moderation process as I see it. I should make

Hacking Whiter‑than‑white hats, malware, penalty and repentance*

Whiter‑than‑white hats, malware, penalty and repentance*

I was recently contacted by a journalist researching a story about ‘hackers’ quitting the dark side (and virus writing in particular) for the bright(-er) side. He cited this set of examples – 7 Hackers Who Got Legit Jobs From Their Exploits – and also mentioned Mike Ellison (formerly known as Stormbringer and Black Wolf, among

Malware My Back Pages* – Virus Bulletin papers and articles

My Back Pages* – Virus Bulletin papers and articles

I recently completed my 14th Virus Bulletin conference paper, co-written with Intego’s Lysa Myers, on “Mac hacking: the way to better testing?” to be presented at the 23rd VB conference in October, in Berlin. The paper itself won’t be available until after the conference, but the abstract is on the Virus Bulletin conference page here.

Fraud The London Scam and the Londonderry Air

The London Scam and the Londonderry Air

My colleagues at ESET Ireland, report that an all-too-familiar scam is currently hitting Irish mailboxes. I’ve talked about it at some length here previously – for instance here and here – but here’s a quick summary. Someone, apparently someone you know (a friend or a family member) contacts you to tell you that they’ve been

Android Darkleech and the Android Master Key: making a hash of it

Darkleech and the Android Master Key: making a hash of it

I made a comment recently that was subsequently quoted in a recent ESET blog – Android “master key” leaves 900 million devices vulnerable, researchers claim – and it appears that comment may have confused one or two people. What I actually said was this: “Security based on application whitelisting relies on an accurate identification of

Scams The Fresh Prince of Bel‑Where? – Academic Publishing Scams

The Fresh Prince of Bel‑Where? – Academic Publishing Scams

[A shorter version of this article was originally published – without illustrations – on the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s eCrime blog.] Phishing attacks targeting academia aren’t the most high-profile of attacks, though they’re more common than you might think. Student populations in themselves constitute a sizeable pool of potential victims for money mule recruitment and other

BYOD Social Engineering, Management, and Security

Social Engineering, Management, and Security

A BYOD dissonance between economic imperative and loss of central control? Discontented staff susceptible to social engineering? David Harley reflects on aspects of Business Reimagined, a new book by Dave Coplin, chief envisioning officer at Microsoft UK, interivewed by Ross McGuinness in Metro.

Cybercrime Intellectual property protection and good badware

Intellectual property protection and good badware

As an earlier article here noted, the recent report from the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property shows a great deal of concern about the “scale of international theft of American intellectual property” which it estimates to be “hundreds of billions of dollars per year.” However, there’s also been a certain amount of

Cybercrime Phishing: the click of death

Phishing: the click of death

Recently we realized that from time to time when people find a live link in one of our blogs, they click on it to see where it goes, even though the context might suggest that the link could be malicious. So we thought it might be a good idea to set up a link so

How To Who goes there? Identity and multiple authentication factors

Who goes there? Identity and multiple authentication factors

Correct identification of an individual using a computer or service is important because it represents the accountability of the person identified. If you know my username on a computer system, you can check on what I do on that system through an audit trail, and I can therefore be held accountable for those actions. However,

Conficker 2012 malware Top Ten and revisiting 2012’s Threatblog

2012 malware Top Ten and revisiting 2012’s Threatblog

Apparently we posted 235 blogs here in 2012, just a fraction under 20 blogs per month on average. So this would be a perfect moment to produce one of those summaries of the year’s activities that wordpress.com provides, telling you how many people viewed your blog site and how many times they’d go round the

backup Backup Basics

Backup Basics

Aryeh Goretsky's paper won't turn you into a business continuity specialist, but is an excellent primer on why, how and when to back up your data.

General Obfuscated JavaScript – Oh What a Tangled Web

Obfuscated JavaScript – Oh What a Tangled Web

My colleague Daniel Novomeský alerted me to a problem he’s observed with the way some web-developers use JavaScript: a few of them have the habit of obfuscating JavaScript code on their web sites, presumably in order to compress it so that it takes less disk-space (“packing”) or using a “protector” in order to make it

Win32/Stuxnet Stuxnet Splits the Atom

Stuxnet Splits the Atom

...an article suggests that "Stuxnet was developed to improve the quality of enriched uranium, so that it no longer can be used for the production of atomic bombs." It's an interesting theory, and I'm certainly not going to say it's wrong...

Malware Aryeh’s Mousing Memoirs

Aryeh’s Mousing Memoirs

“Written in the form of a personal retrospective, this paper compares the earliest days of PC computer viruses with today’s threats, as well as provides a glimpse into the origins of the computer anti-virus industry.”

General Ten Ways to Dodge Cyber‑Bullets (Part 3)

Ten Ways to Dodge Cyber‑Bullets (Part 3)

[Part 3 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.] Do You Need Administrative Privileges? Included for completists, though I don’t think I’ve added anything here to the original blog. I think it’s

Adobe Adobe, Javascript, and the CVE‑2009‑4324 Exploit

Adobe, Javascript, and the CVE‑2009‑4324 Exploit

There has been quite a lot of traffic in the last few weeks about the doc.media.newPlayer vulnerability referenced in the CVE database as CVE-2009-4324. The following Adobe articles refer: http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/apsa09-07.html http://blogs.adobe.com/psirt/2009/12/new_adobe_reader_and_acrobat_v.html http://blogs.adobe.com/psirt/2009/12/security_advisory_apsa09-07_up.html Today’s article at the Internet Storm Center by Bojan Zdrnja (http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7867) gives a lot of detail on a particularly inventive exploit of the

419s Advance Fee Fraud: Another Aspect

Advance Fee Fraud: Another Aspect

When we think Advance Fee Fraud (AFF) we usually think in terms of the 419-type scams often associated with Nigeria, though similar frauds actually come from all over. You know the sort of thing: the banker, or the wife or son or daughter of a defunct dictator or benevolently inclined millionaire plane-crash victim wants to share their

General Ten Ways to Dodge Cyber‑Bullets (Part 2)

Ten Ways to Dodge Cyber‑Bullets (Part 2)

[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