Technology,Security,Software Review
McAfee spent three years researching and developing a new vertical interface for its consumer security suites, and has made them far better in the process. The improved detection engine includes enhanced download scanning, faster scan and start-up times, and a stronger firewall
As Valentine week is going on and a lot of people using search engines to find gifts, cards and screensavers to their Valentine and at the same time malware authors and cybercriminals are ready for it. According McAfee some Valentine’s Day searches for poisoned terms and found some nasty ones very quickly. Screensavers and ecards are always popular:
Valentine Day E-Card search results
Even Rolex watches on Valentine’s Day are not safe:
Some of the poisoned terms I have seen today:
Make sure you surf safely with SiteAdvisor and keep that machine updated
Mozilla has removed two Firefox add-ons from there website. Two experimental add-ons, Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader and all versions of Master Filer were found to contain Trojan code aimed at Windows users. Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader contained Win32.LdPinch.gen, and Master Filer contained Win32.Bifrose.32.Bifrose Trojan. Both of these add-ons are now removed from Firefox Add-on download website.
This vulnerability is known to affect Firefox on Windows only, if either Master Filer or Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader are installed. Versions of Sothink Web Video Downloader greater than 4.0 are not infected. Master Filer was downloaded approximately 600 times between September 2009 and January 2010. Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader was downloaded approximately 4,000 times between February 2008 and May 2008. Master Filer was removed from AMO on January 25, 2010 and Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader was removed from AMO on February 2, 2010. AMO performs a malware check on all add-ons uploaded to the site, and blocks add-ons that are detected as such. This scanning tool failed to detect the Trojan in Master Filer. Two additional malware detection tools have been added to the validation chain and all add-ons were rescanned, which revealed the additional Trojan in Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader. No other instances of malware have been discovered.
Here is a list of antivirus programs known to detect the trojans found in the affected add-ons.
Source : Mozilla Blog
Facebook announced a year long partnership with McAfee to offer a 6 month free subscription to 350 million Facebook users. Facebook users can take advantage of this offer by visiting the Protect Your PC tab on the McAfee Page on Facebook. currently this offer is not available in India but Indian Facebook users can install McAfee by selecting USA or UK from country selection drop down.
For the rare case in which an account is compromised, we’ve developed a unique process that requires the account owner to take steps to secure the account and learn security best practices. We’ve also incorporated custom McAfee software into this process for people identified as having infected computers. Now, if your computer is infected, you will be asked to run a scan like the one shown below and clean it before accessing Facebook. We’re not aware of another free Internet service that takes this much responsibility for helping people keep their accounts secure.
Internet users uses search keywords to find information over the internet. People uses billions of keywords to find information over the internet and malware writers keep eye on these popular keywords and create website that have high percentage of these keywords, a keyword rich website has a high probability of getting top position in search ranking. When users come to these websites, these websites tries to download malicious program on to the visitors computer.
A recent report published by McAfee Titles as “The Web’s Most Dangerous Search Terms”. Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Product Development & Avert Labs Said
Cybercriminals are smart, Like sharks smelling blood in the water, hackers will create related Web sites laden with adware and malware whenever a particular topic increases in popularity. Unsuspecting consumers are then tricked into downloading malicious software that leads them to blindly hand over their personal assets to cybercriminals.
McAfee researched more than 2,600 popular keywords (as defined by Google Zeitgeist, Yahoo! Buzz and others sources) to assess the degree of risk for each. Maximum Risk refers to the maximum percentage of risky sites a user might encounter on a single page of search results.
Spammers are again come up with a new idea to spread spam and other malicious software using yet another free service. This time spammers are using Google Code website to spread the spam. Google Code is Google’s site for developers interested in Google-related/open-source development. The site contains open source code and a list of their services which support public APIs. [According to wikipedia]. Spammers are creating following type of projects in Google code
A new variant of Koobface virus that is well known for sending spam messages over the social networking websites is recently spreading spam messages over the Facebook. Expert says. Facebook users are also reported receiving spam messages such as
Seagate, World leader in storage solution is announced that it will ship self encrypting hard drives. Currently Seagate offer this upto 320GB laptops and they are planning to launch it for 500GB laptops also. Additionally, Dell is now shipping a notebook with a 160GB self-encrypting hard drive. McAfee will provide the software for encrypting the hard drives.
Tom Major, vice president of the Personal Compute Business Unit at Seagate, Said
The new Momentus® FDE (full-disk encryption) notebook hard drives, 5400- and 7200-rpm models with capacities of up to a half-terabyte, deliver powerful protection to help guard against unauthorized access to information on lost or stolen notebook computers. Part of the Seagate Secure family of self-encrypting drives, the Momentus FDE drives feature government-grade encryption that delivers powerful security for confidential customer or corporate information on executive notebook computers, critical customer data on field sales and customer support notebook PCs, and sensitive information on personal notebooks. “Delivering easy-to-use notebook security that also is cost-effective requires leading partnerships and technologies, Seagate is pleased to be teaming with industry leaders to simplify security management for our customers and providing our OEM and channel customers with the world’s fastest self-encrypting hard drive.
The Latitude E6400/6500, E4300, E5400/ E5500, ATG and XFR, the Mobile Precision M6400, M4400, M2400, and Optiplex 960 are includes the PDE technology. According to Dell, laptops with the standard 5,400rpm 120GB drive added would add around $139 to the price
There is an interesting case that I want to share with you.
I am not sure if you guys are aware of it but last year researchers at Google released a paper at the Usenix conference titled “The Ghost in the Browser”.
The paper outlined research efforts at Google that spanned several months analyzing websites, their content, and the amount of malicious code discovered within the sites.
It was discovered that the URLs that Google generate as search results, a big number of those are malicious and it might harm the user’s computer. To keep its users away from such malicious URLs, Google start flagging these websites, by posting a warning sign; this site may harm your computer.
There is a big probability that if you are using Google search engine, you might have came across such scenario. There is a similar scenario that I came across and I would like to share it with you.
I read this on Suman kumar’s blog that Google has flagged Canon India website canon.co.in as potential malicious; Canon India’s Website is an Attack Site?
Google Search Result
I did a search for canon.co.in using Google, found out that it has been flagged as harmful and there is a warning against visiting it.
I ignore this warning, and click on the URL; it took me to another page explaining clearly that this site harmful and you can access it at your own risk but there is no way Google will let you in.
SanDisk has launched SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise USB flash drives protected with McAfee’s anti-malware technology. These drives will add an extra layer of protection in enterprise USB flash drives. When ever any file is copy into the Cruzer Enterprise USB flash drives McAfee heuristics and antivirus engine automatically loads and start scanning the data. Currently all Cruzer Enterprise USB flash drives protects all data with advanced hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption and users can set passwords to their Flash drives. A combination of data encryption and strong password makes it extremely difficult for unauthorized users to access data should the drive be lost or stolen. Lifecycle of all Cruzer Enterprise USB flash drives can be managed remotely, lifecycle includes password recovery and renewal through the network, remote termination of lost drives, central back-up and restore, and central usage tracking. This means data is not lost when a drive is lost, and IT administrators can provision a replacement flash drive with user files stored on the network.
Cruzer Enterprise USB flash drives carry a database of malware signatures and rules that adds a extra load on the USB drives and most importantly the user s has to regularly update malware database. SanDisk also not confirmed the nature of update would be used to update malware database, may it could some thing like the McAfee’s existing USB-based scanning product, VirusScan USB, which works using the U3 software environment
Roy Ramati, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Division at SanDisk,Said
SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise is an ideal solution for the mobile workforce and for IT departments concerned with data security, because it allows employees to have access to data everywhere and yet be fully protected. McAfee’s technology to our security solutions for the enterprise enables our customers to extend their security perimeter to mobile storage.
Prices for the anti-malware SanDisk Cruzer should be announced in the coming days
Source: SANDISK OFFERS McAFEE ANTI-MALWARE TECHNOLOGY IN SECURE USB FLASH DRIVES
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