Education? Master Degree in Computer Engineering.
Position and history at ESET? Security Intelligence Program Manager.
What malware do you hate the most? The ones written in VB and Delphi.
Favorite activities? Rock climbing, snowboarding, hiking.
What is your golden rule for cyberspace? Apply the same caution in cyberspace and in real life.
When did you get your first computer and what kind was it? 1988 – Apple II.
Favorite computer game/activity? Losing at Capture the Flag competitions.
Another week, another scheme from the Nuwar gang. We started receiving reports early this morning that new variants of Nuwar are being advertised through spam. Some of the e-mail subjects include “Please open your ecard.” and “This ecard is hillarious!”. The e-mail contains, as usual, a very simple text and a link to a host
Last Friday, a television report was aired on Canadian television, produced in collaboration with ESET. The topic of the report was, of course, computer security and, specifically, zombie networks (botnets). To show the viewers the dangers of poor security practice, we plugged a computer without security patches on the Internet and waited to see how
Last week our home town of San Diego was host to the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium held by the Internet Society. This conference represented a good opportunity for us to learn the latest research topics under investigation by the academic community. David Dagon and his team from GA Tech presented an interesting paper
Last week, we had reports of a number of web sites being hacked and used to distribute malicious software. The web sites are spread through various countries including Brazil, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, France, and of course the United States. At the moment, it is hard to tell how the servers were compromised. All of
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the Nuwar gang has released a new version of their social engineering scam for Valentine’s Day; they are just a bit early. The gang has started again sending spam messages with subjects related to love. The body of the e-mails contains a short message and a link
There was another twist today in the Nuwar story: it is now being used to host phishing sites. The gang behind this prolific malware has registered several domain names similar those used by well-known banks such as Barclays and Halifax and is directing web requests for these misspelled domain names to computers infected with Nuwar.
The gang behind the Nuwar threat (also called Storm Worm or Zhelatin) has been very active during the holidays. They have been sending numerous waves of spam in an attempt to infect as many users as possible. The gang is taking advantage of the fact that a lot of researchers are taking some time off
There seems to be a common belief that malware only lands on a computer through e-mails. This is far from being the case. Our ThreatSense statistics shows that a lot of Internet users fall for social engineering on web pages and are tricked into installing fake programs. As David Harley pointed out on his blog
At midnight GMT time, we started receiving reports of a new wave of Nuwar e-mails. The e-mails contain the following text trying to convince a user into visiting a malicious website: This Christmas, we want to show you something you will really enjoy. This might not be fun for the whole family, but I bet
This year’s Association of Antivirus Asia Research (AVAR) conference was held in Seoul, Korea. The conference ended this evening after two days of presentations and discussions. The conference was a good opportunity to learn more about specific threats targeting Asia. We learned that online game information stealing is prevalent in this part of the World
At the end of last week, we were made aware of a new targeted attack. The social engineering strategy and malware construction caught our attention because of its sophistication. The threat came as an e-mail addressed to a director at a company based in Canada. The e-mail was addressed with the full name, street address
Computer experts are familiar with the .com file type. The .com extension is often used by binary program files under MS-DOS. Why is this important? Because anything that has the ‘.com’ extension on a windows system is considered as an executable file and is executed when a user doubles click on it. The same is
Today, we are celebrating Halloween and malware authors want to be part of the fun. They love to disguise and they love zombies even more. To celebrate Halloween, the operators of the Storm Worm have launched a new e-mail campaign to attract users to their malicious pages and infect their systems with the latest variant
Nuwar, also known as the Storm Worm, is a very popular threat in the antivirus industry this year. This threat has attracted a lot of attention because of its sophistication and the strenuous efforts made by its authors to maintain a strong botnet. The botherders who operate the Nuwar botnet control infected PCs with a
The antivirus industry sometimes has a reputation of being secretive or even aggressive to newcomers. Only a small visit at the Virus Bulletin conference that is being held in Vienna this year is all it takes to convince anyone of the opposite. It is impressive to see how much information is exchanged during the three
Yesterday, we were shooting a report for a television network in Canada. Part of the report concerns the underground economy. We decided to connect to an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server to see how much stolen credit card data is sold. While looking at the never ending flow of people announcing their PayPal, egold and
Last week, we came across a very interesting piece of software that mixes freedom of speech, network security, and religion. This software is called “e-Jihad” and is freely distributed on the Internet. This software is used to let the owner of a computer give control of his system to the creator of e-Jihad. The makers
A lot of people came back to work on Monday thinking they had a lot of new friends. During the weekend, we observed a very high volume of fake greeting card being sent by e-mail. Of course, these cards don’t come from anonymous friends but from anonymous malware authors wanting to increase the size of
