Highlights of your career? First employee at McAfee; Director at Tribal Voice, one of the first instant messaging companies; moderator at several popular online communities, including Lenovo, Lockergnome Help Forum, Scots Newsletter Forum and Wilders Security Forum; received Microsoft Most Valuable Professional and Neowin Most Valuable Contributor awards.
Position and history at ESET? Joined ESET in 2005 as Manager, Support; moved to Manager, Research in 2006; promoted to Distinguished Researcher in 2009.
What malware do you hate the most? Malware that alters, corrupts, destroys, modifies or steals a user’s data is on my "most-hated" list. To me, that’s the ultimate violation of a user’s computer.
Favorite activities? Keeping telephone scammers on the phone for as long as possible. Also, reading and sleeping.
What is your golden rule for cyberspace? Avoid the impulse to click on things.
When did you get your first computer and what kind was it? The first computer I used would probably have been a Commodore PET. I also used the Apple ][ and Commodore 64. This would have been the late 1970s or early 1980s.
Favorite computer game/activity? I spend most of my free computing time on forums helping answer other users’ technology questions. For computer games, I have been playing ARK: Survival Evolved and Borderlands 2 most recently. For RPG and board games, CaH, Pathfinder, Settlers of Catan, Starfinder and The Walking Dead.
ESET’s threat researchers received a surprise earlier this week when they began receiving reports from ESET LiveGrid that downloads of ComboFix, a tool popular with advanced users for removing malware, were detected as being infected by a variant of the Sality virus, Win32/Sality.NBA.
[UPDATE #1: (21 Dec 2012, 5:30PM) ESET Researcher Cameron Camp has just published the second part of this series on securing your Android device. Read it here on the ESET Threat Blog at Securing Your Holiday Tech Gifts, Part 2: Android Guide. AG] December is upon us, and whether you have a Christmas tree, menorah,
[UPDATE: 10/23/2012, 3:00PM — Testing agency AV-Comparatives has reviewed both ESET NOD32 Antivirus and ESET Smart Security for Windows 8 compatibility. I have updated the blog post below. AG] The release of Windows 8 is this week and interest remains high in Microsoft’s new flagship operating system. We have already taken a
[NOTE: For the latest information about compatibility between ESET’s software and Windows 8, please see the following blog post: W8ing for V6: What ESET has in store for Windows 8 Users. (10/23/2012, 4:15PM)] Windows 8 will be available to the public in three weeks, and interest in the latest version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system
On Thursday, September 12, Duo Security, a young-but-respected vendor of two-factor authentication devices, announced the preliminary results of a study of over 20,000 Android devices from a two month old study they performed. Based on the results, they calculated that over half of Android devices on the market have security vulnerabilities that are, as yet,
Today I received the following message in my inbox, claiming to be from the Asian Domain Registration Service and warning me that the eset brand was in danger of being registered by a third-party. Here is the message I received, which I’ve included in its entirety, except for a few bits: Received: from mail.umail168.cn4e.com
In the middle of working on a blog post about SMS phishing scams at my desk last night, I received a rather strange call. The number displayed on the Caller ID was +1 (360) 474-3925. I did not recognize the number, but since it was 7:10PM, I assumed it was a colleague trying to reach
News of SMS (text) phishing scams are nothing new to readers of this blog. ESET researcher Cameron Camp recently wrote an article explaining how they work and how to avoid them here on ESET’s Threat Blog: SMSmishing (SMS Text Phishing) – how to spot and avoid scams, And just before Valentine’s Day, my colleague Stephen
With the recent announcements of password breaches at LinkedIn, and warnings from Google about state-sponsored attacks on Gmail accounts, it seems like a good idea now to review some password security basics. In this blog post, we’re going to take a look at a rather low-tech solution to a decidedly high-tech problem: How to guard
At ESET, we spend a great deal of time researching the latest technologies and how they may be affected by frauds and scams. Sometimes these are “old fashioned” spam through email, or they may be programs like fake antivirus programs or ransomware. And we certainly have blogged extensively about PC support scams where the caller
Introduction Mobile World Congress 2012 is almost upon us, and one of the most hotly-anticipated topics is the next generation of Microsoft’s smartphone operating system Windows Phone 8, which has been kept under wraps far more tightly than its PC counterpart, Windows 8. While Microsoft was an early adopter in the creation of smartphones with
Tomorrow, on January 18, 2012, dozens of popular websites covering a diverse range of subjects will be blacking out their home pages in protest of the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Some of these websites are well-known, such as the English language web site for the encyclopedic Wikipedia and quirky news site Boing Boing,
Our white paper on Potentially Unwanted Applications (PUAs) has been revised with additional information, including information about how legitimate software can become classified as a PUA due to its misuse, a discussion of a type of downloader called a software wrapper and updated screen shots. It can be found in the White Papers section: Problematic,
While I share the reluctance of my colleagues to predict the future, I think there are some trends that can be classified as “reasonably likely to occur” in 2012. I make no promises, but here’s what I think we will see, in no particular order of importance or certainty. We will see increased interest in
Since yesterday’s Much Ado About Facebook post in the ESET Threat Blog, we have written additional articles, received a few comments, and also received updated information on the “threat,” so it seems that now is a good time for a follow-up article. Reports continue to come in of pornographic and violent imagery on Facebook, and
The Reuters news agency reported earlier today a sudden increase in violent and pornographic images and videos on Facebook. A quick review of my personal account and a check-in with my other Facebook-wielding colleagues revealed a couple of nothing more than a couple of suggestive pictures, complete with snarky comments embedded in them, from the
The United States Attorney Office for the Southern District of New York received a flurry of attention in April, 2011 when they unsealed an indictment against the three largest Internet poker companies in the United States—Absolute Poker, Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars—for fraud, gambling and money laundering. Today, the USAO upped the ante with an
Nearly three years old, the Conficker worm continues to pose a threat to PCs. Aryeh Goretsky wants to know why this is, and what can be done about it.
Forensic software developer PassWare announced a new version of its eponymous software forensics kit on Tuesday. Already several news sources are writing about how the program can automatically obtain the login password from a locked or sleeping Mac simply by plugging in a USB flash drive containing their software and connecting it to another computer
The death of Osama bin Laden has gone viral, with blogs, social media and search engines pumping terabytes of rumor, innuendo and conspiracy theories at the speed of light, along with the occasional kilobyte of truth. As the number of people searching for pictures and videos of bin Laden’s execution has skyrocketed, the criminal syndicates
