Author Archive for bparmar63

17
Nov
09

My Scareware Night!

By bparmar63 Leave a Comment
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Here’s an interesting article from Larry Dignan, one of the editors at ZDNet.

Apparently his computer was overtaken by Antivirus Pro 2009 – a vicious piece of malware. It takes over your computer, hijacks Internet Explorer and inundates you with porn popups forcing you to register the software. Larry had McAfee AV installed on his computer but repeated scans during the attack failed to detect the malware because there was no AV Signature available from McAfee at the time. Although Antivirus Pro is not new it had morphed and changed its signature. Larry finally got a copy of Kaspersky – which had an updated signature and got rid of the problem.

Had Larry been running Faronics Anti-Executable at the time, nothing would have happened as Antivirus Pro 2009 would not have been allowed to run. In time McAfee would have pushed an updated signature file, detected Antivirus Pro 2009 and removed it. Larry would have been saved the stress, anguish and particulary the time it took him to solve his problems.

http://bit.ly/2pMnhT

 

16
Nov
09

Security Incidents Cost $17.2 billion per Year

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Last year midsized companies spent a total of $17.2 billion fixing IT security incidents according to new research out this week from McAfee.

McAfee recently had MSI International surveyed 900 companies with between 51 and 1,000 employees to find that in the past year a single midsized organization lost $43,000 on average due to security incidents and that 56 percent of these companies suffered an increasing number of security incidents.

Nearly 30 percent of small businesses suffered a breach in the last year and McAfee reports that there has been a 322 percent increase in cyber attacks waged on midsized organizations in the past year.

Most midsized organizations are aware that security breaches can have dire consequences—71 percent of IT management at these companies believe there is some chance a serious breach could put their company out of business. However, many of these organizations are under the mistaken perception that hackers like to target larger companies. Approximately 43 percent think that organizations with more than 500 employees are at greater risk for an attack.

Read the full article here:

http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Security/Midsized-Companies-Lose-Average-of-43K-Per-Year-From-Security-Incidents-614511/

28
Sep
09

IRS Spam drains millions daily from victims

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A recent spam campaign that pretends to be from the IRS is playing on people’s fear of the tax man to propagate malware. The email has a subject line that reads, “Notice of Underreported Income” and requires the victim to either install the Trojan attachment or click on a Web link in order to view their “tax statement.” In fact, that link takes the victim to a malicious Web site.

This campaign is in its third week and continues to grow with reported estimates that it constitutes almost 10% of all spam. The malware attachment is a variant of the hard-to-detect Zeus Trojan. This software hacks into bank accounts and drains them of money as part of a widespread financial fraud scheme. Researchers estimate that the Zeus criminals are emptying more than a million dollars per day out of victims’ bank accounts with the software.

Testing of this malware has been done by Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics with the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has found that only five of the 41 antivirus detection systems used by VirusTotal managed to spot it. Here’s the quote that sums up why AV alone is not enough and why WhiteListing (Faronics Anti-Executable) needs to be added to your layered security strategy.

“It’s difficult to stay ahead of it via antivirus because the Zeus binaries are changing a few times a day to evade detection,” said Paul Ferguson, a researcher with Trend Micro, via instant message. “It’s definitely a problem.”

19
Jun
09

MS “Free” AV to release beta next week

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MS announced that it’s new “Free” Anti-virus software will be released in beta next week. To be named Microsoft Security Essentials, MSE is the descendant of “One Care”. The beta will be limited to 75k downloads and its target is global.
Interestingly enough they are actually targetting Brazil and China – both are large vectors of malware infection because users are running Windows without AV. MSE is aimed first and foremost at users who either can’t or won’t pay for antivirus/anti-malware software.

There will be no registration required, no trials with an expiration date or required renewals. But Microsoft is restricting the MSE download (both the beta and final) to PCs running Genuine Windows (which has been authenticated as non-pirated).

Don’t cancel your current AV contracts yet though. While MSE makes use of the same core engine as the Forefront Client product Microsoft offers to businesses, it doesn’t provide the management capabilities that the paid Forefront Client — or the former Windows Live OneCare subscription offering do.