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.
We’ve just come across an IRC controlled backdoor that enables the infected machine to become a bot for Distributed Denial of Service attacks. The interesting part about it is that it’s a Mach-O binary – targeting Mac OS X. ESET’s research team compared this to samples in our malware collection and discovered that this code
ESET had quite a strong representation at Virus Bulletin this year in Barcelona, as David Harley mentioned in his post prior to the conference. On the first day, Pierre-Marc Bureau presented his findings about the Kelihos botnet, David Harley and AVG’s Larry Bridwell discussed the usefulness and present state of AV testing, and to finish
On Saturday, another controversial report of a “government trojan” appeared. This time it is the German government that has been accused by the European hacker club Chaos Computer Club (CCC) of using “lawful interception” malware. Hence, “Bundestrojaner” (Federal Trojan), though that name is normally applied to the legal concept that allows German police to make
New stolen digital certificates are used by the multi-purpose backdoor Qbot. The criminals behind the Qbot trojan are certainly not inactive. As I mentioned in a blog post earlier this month, after a quiet summer we have seen a batch of new Qbot variants. An interesting fact is that the malicious binaries were digitally signed.
ESET has discovered a new version of the Delphi infector, Win32/Induc. Unlike its predecessors, however, this variant incorporates a seriously malicious payload and has acquired some extra file infection and self-replicative functionality. Two years ago, we published comprehensive information (here , here, and here) about the virus Win32/Induc.A, which infected Delphi files at compile-time. Though
The authors of Win32/Qbot (a.k.a. Qakbot) are back with new variants of this infamous malware, and this time the binaries are digitally signed. Qbot is a multifunctional trojan that has had some significant impact in the past. It has also been around a while, with the first variants dating as far back as spring 2007,
Among the many different trojans that spread on Facebook, something popped up recently that caught our particular attention. The threat, detected by ESET as Win32/Delf.QCZ, is interesting for several reasons. Distribution First, let’s look at the distribution vector. Win32/Delf.QCZ relies on the old “fake codec/media player trick” and links to the malware-laden site are
The most common malware technique for avoiding detection is to create loads of “fresh” variants. Actually, the component that changes so frequently is the packer – the outer layer of the malware, used by malware authors to encrypt the malware and make it harder to detect – whilst the functionality of the malicious code inside
One of the most common ways to propagate malware through social engineering is to piggyback it on some attention-catching news event. This can be carried out using a variety of techniques and is certainly nothing new. One infamous example from 2007 was Win32/Nuwar (a/k/a the Storm Worm), which distributed through spam emails with current and/or
