François Paget is a senior threat research engineer and one of the founding members of McAfee Labs, where he conducts a variety of forecast studies and performs technological monitoring. He focuses on the various aspects of organized cybercrime and the malicious use of the Internet for geopolitical purposes. As Secretary-General of CLUSIF (Club de la Sécurité de l’Information Français), Paget is involved with the association’s "Threats" workshop and the organization of the Annual Cybercrime Overview conference. Paget is also a regular conference speaker at various French and international events in the information system security field.
In the quarterly McAfee Threats Reports we offer our readers some charts on the prevalence of messaging botnets. For the last quarter of 2012, we announced the continuing decline in global messaging botnet infections as well as in former leaders Festi and Cutwail (see page 23). In this blog, I will detail the evolution of Read more…
Tags: botnet, Cutwail, Festi, Kelihos, Lethic, Maazben, McAfee Threats Report, waledac
Yesterday in Lille, the 5th CyberSecurity International Forum (FIC2013) ended with a speech by Manuel Valls, the French Minister of the Interior. Among the subjects, the Minister informed the audience about the increasing dangers of cyberjihad. Since January 11, France has been engaged in Mali. The Africans had appealed for urgent military aid to halt Read more…
After the publication of the 2013 Threats Predictions from McAfee Labs, I have received many queries regarding our expectation of a possible slowdown in Anonymous activity this year. Some readers agreed, while others were more skeptical. With this blog, I will attempt to explain these positions. The Anonymous signature Today, many people use the Anonymous Read more…
Tags: Anonymous, decline, Hacktivism
In 2009, McAfee Labs published the virtual criminology report “The Age of Cyber Warfare.” At that time we received some surprised comments from incredulous people. Since then, this area has evolved considerably. Today independent experts are no longer reluctant to predict government-sponsored military and industrial espionage or targeted cyberattacks causing physical damage. Cyberwar and cyberterrorism Read more…
Tags: cyberwar, cyberwarfare, Ezzidine Al-Qassam, IDF, Israeli Defense Force, The Age of Cyber Warfare, The Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, The Use of the Internet for Terrorist Purposes, tweet, twitter, youtube
On the occasion of the establishment of the French-language McAfee “Cybervigilance” blog, I offered to my compatriots some statistics related to France that cover the first three quarters of 2012. Below you’ll find these figures for those who don’t understand the language of Molière. As of September 30, nearly 150,000 suspicious Internet addresses hosted in Read more…
Tags: bad-reputation URLs, botnet, malware statistics, phishing, suspicious URLs
A l’occasion de la mise en place du blog McAfee France, il nous est paru intéressant de vous proposer quelques statistiques liées à notre pays et couvrant les 3 premiers trimestres de 2012. Au 30 septembre 2012, près de 150.000 adresses Internet suspectes hébergées en France ont été analysées par McAfee. Elles n’étaient qu’au nombre Read more…
On September 3, the AntiSec branch of Anonymous announced their March hack of a Dell Vostro laptop used by an FBI agent. AntiSec discovered a file containing a list of millions of Apple iOS devices, including their Unique Device Identifiers (UDIDs) and personal data for their owners. The hackers did not publish the file NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv, Read more…
“Police ransomware” is big business, generating millions of euros for organized criminal groups. In May, at Europol’s headquarters in The Hague, police officers from 14 EU member states affected by this threat met with representatives from Europol, Eurojust, Interpol, and industry. Police ransomware, as explained on the Europol website, typically appears as a pop-up window, Read more…
Tags: Cybercrime, online payment, Police, Ransomware
In 2009, I alerted our readers about malicious campaigns exploiting the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Important sport events continue to attract spammers and scammers, so you can guess which big event is now on their radar. The Olympic Games in London have inspired emails such as this: These mails inform the recipients that Read more…
This past weekend, various postgraduate students in France ended their academic year by making final modifications in their theses. On Sunday, I assisted some of them. While browsing the Internet for some last-minute data, they suffered the fright of their lives: the sudden closing of their Microsoft Word software–without prompting to save their data–no more Read more…
Tags: fake alert, fake-av, Ransomware, rogue antivirus
Posts by Francois Paget