Avira: security or marketing?
Trust in your antivirus software is important, especially if you have willingly paid to purchase and install it on the PC. When the antivirus starts to sell some sort of advertising message shown after an automatic update as security, however, the aforementioned trust begins to leave place to delusion and you ask yourself who is dumber: you paying to be mocked or the genius that decided to turn a protection software into a carrier of cheap marketing.
AntiVir Personal is 10 years old and Avira gives its customers a gift
It’s celebration time for Avira, the German security company headquartered in the little town of Tettnang best known for its renowned antivirus software. AntiVir Personal, the free antivirus offered by Avira to its customers has recently marked its tenth anniversary, and to properly celebrate the occasion the company prepared a special offer for who decided to purchase one of its commercial products within the next few days.
How the security industry reacts to a bootkit maker
Austrian eighteen years old Peter Kleissner recently become famous for being the author of Stoned, the tool which exploits Master Boot Record rootkits techniques to bypass Microsoft operating systems protections and allow the execution of unauthorized code - be it legit or not. But the popularity the young programmer gained thanks to Stoned caused disagreeing reactions by security market companies.
New tricks for file viruses
File viruses are only a small part of nowadays malicious code diversified landscape, and yet these ancient malware designed to infect legitimate software by parasitizing its executable routines continue, every now and then, to hit the headlines with news worth the attention. The latest couple of examples of this remarkable endurance ability affects an old but still popular development environment and the most known among CAD (Computer Aided Design) programs.
Rootkits penetrate the heart of the machine
Since, in 2005, the nasty commercial policies of Sony BMG uncovered the possibility to seize control on the operating system to hinder the normal working of the PC and peripherals, the evolution of rootkit software went through an unparalleled acceleration. The interest for the matter rose in research and among cyber-criminals gangs, with the result that can be esteemed in these days: rootkits have reached the lowest levels of electronic devices circuitry by infecting network routers, the BIOS and even the most privileged working mode of the x86 processors.
File viruses, the outbreak goes on
As previously highlighted, traditional viruses, the ones that nowadays are generally defined as “file viruses” and target executable programs parasitizing and exploiting them as a medium for their propagation, even though reduced to a marginal component of the crowded zoo of beasties making up modern malware aren’t vanished at all. A confirmation of this is the fact that, after the Sality case, new parasitic viruses families have in the past days caught the attention of experts and security firms.
Sality virus, the species evolution
The numbers clearly demonstrate it, nowadays the main threats to computer security are those coming from worms, trojans, backdoors, malicious code categories that have nothing to do with the historical “viruses”. But those digital parasites which travelled from file to file (and from floppy to floppy), hunting for new habitats and new victims to infect still survive today when malware is a business and the worm-based botnets have a scary amount of zombie-PC to use against institutions, firms or the network infrastructures of entire nations.
The rootkit in the soul
If there’s a defect that have always profoundly conditioned my life it is undoubtedly the almost supernatural ability to choose the most twisted way to face a problem or a situation. A girl says to me she’s in love with someone other? I profess her my unconditional love for life. My father has retired and his company needs a new storekeeper? I leave and come to Bologna to go hungry in search for something that very probably doesn’t even exist.
Free 6 months license for Avira AntiVir Premium
Avira GmbH, the renowned German security firm which develops the Avira AntiVir antivirus, is running a special promotion in collaboration with PC Welt (the localized edition of PC World magazine) giving away to users a free 6 months license for AntiVir Premium, lately proclaimed the best antivirus of 2008 by AV-Comparatives.
AVIRA AntiVir is the best antivirus of the year
Are you constantly searching for a good antivirus, or better still the best antivirus currently on sale to stay away from the many dangers of that very dangerous place Internet has become? Here is a good chance: AV-Comparatives, the reference point for antimalware software testing, has proclaimed AVIRA AntiVir the winner of best antivirus of the year award.
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