Awhile back we noted a case where Ramona Fricosu, a woman accused of involvement in a mortgage scam, was asked, following a law enforcement raid in which her laptop was seized, to decrypt data on the device for use as evidence, potentially incriminating her. She pleaded the 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination and refused to
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
In the wake of the flood of recent mortgage/housing fraud, a police raid in Colorado resulted in a laptop seizure they feel may contain evidence to help a case. Turns out it’s encrypted. Citing suspicion of nastiness contained therein, the U.S. Government has asked a federal judge to compel the owner, Ramona Fricosu, to enter
Our colleagues Aleksandr Matrosov and Eugene Rodionov are tracking the evolution of TDL4 (also known as Win32/Olmarik). The following is a report on the latest TDL4 update, released last week. In our previous blog post, we described how the latest Microsoft Security Update modified the Windows OS loader (winloader.exe) to fix a vulnerability that allowed
It will likely come as no surprise to regular readers of ESET's Threat Blog that we are somewhat gadget aficionados here in the Research Department. Our focus, however, is usually on issues such as malware, spam and privacy so we do not spend a lot of time discussing gadgetry. Every once in a while, though,
There are quite a few reports currently about particularly ugly development son the fake AV front. The Register’s John Leyden has referred to a “double dipping” attack, in which the notorious Antivirus 2009 is implicated in an attack that goes beyond offering useless rogue anti-malware to inflicting actual damage on user data files, in order to force the victim
One of the security best practices is to back up your data regularly. This is sound advice as it helps mitigate the damages from many different threats. Lots of people think of data loss when they think of viruses, but very few viruses actually tried to cause data loss. There have been a few that
If sensitive information is stored on your hard drive (and if you don’t have -something- worth protecting on your system, you’re probably not reading this blog…), protect it with encryption. Furthermore, when you copy or move data elsewhere, it’s usually at least as important to protect/encrypt it when it’s on removable media, or transferred electronically.
