Avast! is a company that makes a decent anti-virus program. They recently published some statistics that are interesting: Their anti-virus programs blocks 1 billion malware a month. That’s 1,000,000,000 attempts to install viruses, trojans, password stealers, etc on to people’s PCs. A month. And that’s just by one small company. 1 in 15 people encounter … Continue reading Malware Statistics
Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) was released recently by Microsoft. It’s free for anyone to download and test it before the final version’s finished. A few days before the official release someone posted a copy on a BitTorrent network. Unfortunately this copy was infected with a trojan that downloads more malware. This is very bad. … Continue reading Windows 7 RC on BitTorrent
We all know that malware can steal your passwords, cause you to lose money, and spread itself to other PCs. But can malware actually cause damage to your PC? The short answer is yes. A botnet is a collection of infected PCs under a hacker’s control. There are millions of PCs today forming these botnets … Continue reading Can Malware Damage Your PC?
Another Mac trojan. There’s a program for Macs called MacCinema Installer. The filename is: Flash.Player.Update.v9.19.dmg. Some web sites claim that you need to install it to watch their videos. When you install it, it adds something to your Mac so that every 5 hours it will try to download malware. So if your Mac becomes … Continue reading MacCinema
There is a competition where people try to hack web browsers (they call it Pwn2own) , the winners get thousands of dollars in cash and prizes. Below are the results of the competition. It says a lot about which web browsers are safer than others: Safari running on Mac OS X – hacked in 10 … Continue reading Browser Hacking Competition Results
A rather serious exploit has recently been discovered. It’s called ClickJacking. The problem is in Adobe’s Flash player, which just about everyone in the world has installed (sometimes without even knowing it). The vulnerability makes it possible for someone to control your computer’s webcam or microphone, lettting other people spy on you. It’s a serious … Continue reading ClickJacking Exploit
There’s a new bit of malware that attacks your computer’s clipboard. Here’s how it works: You open a web page that has a hacked bit of Flash (sometimes it’s a hacked ad shown on an innocent page) The Flash code puts a link in your computer’s clipboard Every time you do a “paste” (e.g. Control-V) … Continue reading Clipboard Attacks
TrueCrypt is an encryption program we wrote about earlier. It lets you do things like "whole disk encryption" (good for people who carry around laptops full of confidential files), and other encryption functions. Version 6.0 came out a few days ago. It’s open source, meaning everyone is free to review the source code. It’s available … Continue reading TrueCrypt 6.0
The FireFox and Safari browsers have been updated. If you use either of these then you should upgrade today. The new version numbers are: FireFox: 2.0.0.14 Safari: 3.1.1 This applies to Windows, Mac and Linux users. The updates fix vulnerabilities and hence are important security updates.