Conficker, the perfect storm worm
The Conficker worm, also known as Downup, Downadup or Kido, is floating around since October 2008. Security firms know it pretty well, and in the past days the malware has become known as much well to users too having infected a significant amount of machines all over the world. We have returned to the “good” old times of Sasser, Blaster and Mydoom outbreaks, and the already worrisome proliferation of the worm threatens to get even worse because of some conditions that increasingly support its spreading.
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.
22,000 new malware samples per day, a network worm breakout and the sandbox-enabled antivirus
From a computer security standpoint, 2008 surely has been a year of passion. Nay worse, it has been a dramatic year characterized by figures beyond any imagination, a steady hammering of new threats that has lasted till the end and that is expected to be the same or even worse during this year.
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.
Internet? A very dangerous place
Trend Micro security enterprise has ranked the attack vectors exploited by the 100 most widespread malware from January to November 2008, and the results speak by themselves: among all the possible infection ways Internet is absolutely the most used (or better still abused) one by worms, trojans and other types of digital pathogenetic agents constantly hunting for victims and unprotected systems to compromise.
AV-Comparatives releases the latest proactive tests results
AV-Comparatives, the Austrian team of experts dedicated to antivirus tests acknowledged as a reference point in the field, has published the second part of the mid-year comparative, an ideal addendum to the one already released in the past September. This time the aim is to evaluate the antimalware tools effectiveness against unknown threats, in a test scenario meant to prove the heuristic part and the generic markers of the on-demand scanning engines.
New Gpcode version detected. Ransomware strikes again
A dangerous malware breed skilled in cryptographic techniques is coming back under the spotlight. Trend Micro has spotted in the wild a new Gpcode variant, the trojan that since 2005 has let everybody know the meaning of the world ransomware, that is a type of malware expressly designed to encrypt the user’s data files asking afterward for a money ransom to restore them.
Mikko Hypponen calls upon the foundation of the Internetpol
It’s a picture full of shadows and few lights the one outlined in the quarterly security report by F-Secure, a well-known Finnish company that produces antivirus software and integrated protection solutions. By analyzing the striking cyber-crime cases reported during the third quarter of 2008, the wrap-up highlights the difficulty to effectively fight an international phenomenon with the only aid from the local laws and the current cooperation treaties between the police authorities.
AV-Comparatives, the August tests are on-line
As is tradition at the end of summer, from the Austrian labs of Andreas Clementi and the analysts team behind AV-Comparatives come the updated comparative tests on 16 among the most known antivirus on the market. As a recognized industry standard for evaluating the effectiveness of antivirus solutions, the Clementi’s comparatives put in comparison security software against more than 2.3 millions of malware samples variously assorted, further providing useful indications on the capabilities of the programs to avoid false positives and the total scanning speed.
BGP hijacking, the Internet borders are insecure
The DNS spoofing risk - also known as the “DNS bug” - discovered by Dan Kaminsky? It’s only the beginning: the very foundations of Internet are squashy jelly in the hands of the most capable hackers, and the demonstrations on the deep insecurity of the world network infrastructures increase seamlessly. The last one is a reminder of a well-known flaw, which involves the systems of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and that, on the contrary of the DNS bug, won’t be suitably tackled still for a long time.
Internet & Windows Vista: it’s the age of the Great Flaws
Announcements of network apocalypses come from Las Vegas, where the major security experts have met to discuss about the state of things of the modern computer platforms during the Black Hat conference held the last week. The message given describes just a dramatic scenery, where Internet structural flaws couple with those as much as fundamental of Windows Vista to provide the “good fella” with an entire new rack of attacks against users and assorted net services.
The Pentagon “super cracker” will be extradited to the United States
Gary McKinnon, that is the 42 years old Englishman better known as Solo the Pentagon hacker, achieved notoriety in the first years of the new millennium with a series of unauthorized access operations to the most important American computer systems, by which he searched for - as he stated - the truth about the UFOs meanwhile installing backdoors, stealing military secrets and abusing of secret passwords supposedly far from being adequate to the security level of systems they was meant to protect.
EICAR test file, antimalware testing with no collateral damages
In the sad scenery of an absolute lack of conventions generally recognized among the antivirus and antimalware manufacturers, at least one standard does exist. An anchor that takes the official name of EICAR Standard Anti-Virus Test File and means to provide, as it’s easy to conclude, a universally valid tool to evaluate the normal working of whatever malicious software protection.
Malware has put down roots into Google Blogger
Google Blogger, the blogging platform available since 1999 has turned into a privileged spreading tool for computer infections, going as far as hosting 2% of all the malware currently circulating through the connected world. So say Sophos security enterprise, that with numbers in its hands raises the alarm and states that the fault is not entirely of Google. Maybe.
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