Author Archive
AV Testing, AMTSO and EICAR
By David Harley at 16 May, 2012, 12:48 am
Back in 2008, EICAR rejected a paper proposed by Andrew Lee and myself discussing the state of anti-malware testing and how it might be improved, on the grounds that it was “advertising” the fledgling AMTSO (Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization) initiative. You can decide for yourselves whether that criticism was justified: the same paper was accepted … Read More…
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Loading ...Facebook Memes: not always innocuous
By David Harley at 1 May, 2012, 2:03 pm
A few months ago I wrote a fairly short comment piece for Virus Bulletin on how some popular posts to Facebook that invite you to make use of your personal data might be useful to scammers and others as part of some sort of data aggregation attack. An example I included was a popular posting … Read More…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Support Scam Poll
By David Harley at 1 May, 2012, 12:49 pm
Apologies if you're bored with my banging on about PC support scams, but it seems that there are plenty of people who aren't. At any rate, some of my previous blogs on the subject have attracted more comments than any of my blogs on other topics, and in fact, I've learned a great deal from some … Read More…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Windows 8 is Coming, What’s New About It?
By David Harley at 18 April, 2012, 2:30 pm
We take a look at what is new in the Windows 8 Operating System from Microsoft.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...How to recognize a PC support scam
By David Harley at 18 April, 2012, 1:45 pm
A while ago, I responded to a blog comment promising some thoughts on how to recognize a cold-calling PC support scam. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do that immediately, and then I was on vacation with no Internet connectivity (I should do that more often!). But then, since the problem isn't going to disappear any … Read More…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...CeCOS VI: The Counter eCrime Operations Summit
By David Harley at 16 April, 2012, 2:35 pm
[Updated to repair a glitch in the registration link.]
I’ve had a long if intermittent association with the Anti-Phishing Working Group, going back to the early noughties when I represented the UK’s National Health Service there for a while, and subsequently as an individual member and through my association with ESET. Its focus has widened from … Read More…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Free Anti-virus: Worth Every Penny?
By David Harley at 5 April, 2012, 5:27 am
Andrew Lee just drew my attention to a poll carried out by an IT magazine in the UK, asking the question ‘Do you think it's necessary to use paid-for anti-virus software to effectively protect your PC?’ Clearly this is a question that a lot of people ask, but the answer is more complicated than you … Read More…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...VirusTotal, Useful Engines, and Useful AV
By David Harley at 2 April, 2012, 10:27 am
In a recent blog on whether security professionals really don't use anti-virus (sorry, but quite a few of us do!) I mentioned a paper by myself and Julio Canto on the use and misuse of multi-scanner sites like VirusTotal. Especially the (Virus-)totally inappropriate use of VT reports as some sort of substitute for real comparative testing.
I … Read More…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Blackhole, CVE-2012-0507 and Carberp
By David Harley at 30 March, 2012, 1:05 am
This week Blackhole has been updated to version 1.2.3 and includes a new exploit for the Java CVE-2012-0507 vulnerability, which ESET calls Java/Exploit.CVE-2012-0507. Earlier this week information was published about the Blackhole update by French malware researcher Xylitol and last week Microsoft shared information about an interesting way of breaching the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) … Read More…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Win32/Carberp Gang on the Carpet
By David Harley at 20 March, 2012, 12:15 pm
[Update: police have issued a video of the man they say ran the whole group.]
We've spent quite a lot of time on this blog in the last year or more discussing Win32/Carberp, which has also found its way into the occasional paper and presentation.
So it gave us particular pleasure to see that our friends at … Read More…
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