Education? Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava
Highlights of your career? Giving presentations at several security conferences, including EICAR, CARO, and Virus Bulletin.
Position and history at ESET? Malware Researcher since 2007, currently holds the position Security Intelligence Team Lead.
What malware do you hate the most? Grayware/PUAs – when malware authors complain about detection and try to convince you they’re not malware.
Favorite activities? Snowboarding, listening to music, playing guitar…
What is your golden rule for cyberspace? Be reasonably paranoid..
When did you get your first computer and what kind was it? During primary school. It was an Intel 8088 palmtop, used it for programming in GW-BASIC
Favorite computer game/activity? Project I.G.I.
Last time we wrote about Android/Simplocker – the first ransomware for Android that actually encrypts user files – we discussed different variants of the malware and various distribution vectors that we’ve observed. Android/Simplocker has proven to be an actual threat in-the-wild in spite of its weaknesses…
ESET LiveGrid® telemetry has indicated several new infection vectors used by Android/Simplocker. The “typical” ones revolve around internet porn, or popular games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Last weekend saw the (somewhat anticipated) discovery of an interesting mobile trojan – the first spotting of a file-encrypting ransomware for Android by our detection engineers.
An interesting new piece of Android malware has been spotted this week. The threat, detected by ESET security products as Android/Samsapo.A, uses a technique typical of computer worms to spread itself.
Win32/Corkow is banking malware with a focus on corporate banking users. We can confirm that several thousand users, mostly in Russia and Ukraine, were victims of the Trojan in 2013. In this post, we expand on its unique functionality.
Last month we discovered filecoder malware which called itself “Cryptolocker 2.0”. Naturally, we wondered if this is a newer version of the widespread ransomware from the creators of the first. We look at the details that hint that it might have been created by some other, unknown, cybercrime gang.
In September we informed about a new banking trojan called Hesperbot (detected as Win32/Spy.Hesperbot). The perpetrators responsible for the threat are still active – November has been particularly eventful. In this post, we’ll give an update on the situation and malware developments.
Trojans that encrypt user files and try to extort a ransom from the victim in exchange for a decryptor utility are nothing new. We’ve noted a significant increase in Filecoder activity over the past few summer months - in this blog post we address the questions we’re getting about this issue.
In this 3rd Hesperbot blog post we’ll look at the most intriguing part of the malware - the way it handles network traffic interception.
Win32/Spy.Hesperbot is a new banking trojan that has been targeting online banking users in Turkey, the Czech Republic, Portugal and the United Kingdom. For more information about its malware spreading campaigns and victims, refer to our first blog post. In this post we’ll cover the technical details of the malware, including the overall architecture, as well as the mobile component.
A new and effective banking trojan has been discovered targeting online banking users in Turkey, the Czech Republic, Portugal and the United Kingdom. It uses very credible-looking phishing-like campaigns, related to trustworthy organizations, to lure victims into running the malware.
Bitcoin is not the only crypto-currency targeted by malware now that a Trojan designed to steal Litecoins has been discovered. In this post we review recent discoveries in malware impacting digital money.
ESET’s Security Research Lab details a malware-spreading campaign leveraging the deadline for tax returns in Slovakia and examines a case of infection where a bank's two-factor authentication prevented financial loss.
The ‘PokerAgent’ botnet, which we have tracked in 2012, was designed to harvest Facebook log-on credentials, also collecting information on credit card details linked to the Facebook account and Zynga Poker player stats, presumably with the intention to mug the victims.
The infamous exploit packs Blackhole and Nuclear Pack now feature a new zero-day Java exploit that exploits the Java vulnerability CVE-2013-0422. The latest version of Java 7 Update 10 is affected. Malware spreading through drive-by-downloads often utilizes exploit packs, which are able to serve malware variants without any user interaction, as opposed to other techniques
Win32/Quervar (a.k.a Dorifel, XDocCrypt) is a virus family that has been in the news recently, especially in the Netherlands. It has been reported to be causing havoc on computers of several notable Dutch institutions. In our analysis, we provide additional technical details about the workings of the virus and compare it to another virus, the
For the story behind the suspected industrial espionage, where ACAD/Medre.A was used, refer to Righard Zwienenberg’s blog post. For technical details from analysing the worm’s source code, read on. ACAD/Medre.A is a worm written in AutoLISP, a dialect of the LISP programming language used in AutoCAD. Whilst we classify it as a worm, due to
Even visiting security-oriented websites can sometimes be risky. If you’ve visited the security blog zerosecurity.org this month and you’re also a user of ESET’s security products, you might have encountered an anti-virus alert such as this one: The detection names may vary. Different variants of the following “generic families” were detected on the compromised websites on
Fraudsters continue to innovate their scam propagation methods. Again using Facebook and a pretense of a shocking video, they also utilize browser plugins to execute malicious scripts. We also see how the malware scene is intertwined, when the user is directed to a dubious Potentially Unwanted Application. Facebook auto-like scams have been commonplace on the
Recently, a new data-stealing worm caught our attention. The reason why it stands out from many similar amateur creations is that its author is most probably Czech, as the text strings, variable and function names used by the malware suggest. The Czech text above is displayed by the worm inside a console window and translates
