Wednesday, October 03, 2007

"It used to be that the advice to the end-user was 'keep your software up to date and then don't go to bad Web sites,'" he said. "You still don't want to go to those sites, but what we seen now is that you can be on a very legitimate site and have a problem."

Users should also be wary of fake accounts set up on legitimate social networking sites, which are often designed with one thing in mind: to lure unsuspecting users to malicious Web sites. So with all this badware, is the Internet a more dangerous place to be?

It's a tough question, Weinstein says, but he believes things are getting better, largely because people are getting smarter about what they do online. "I think the bad guys are always trying to stay a step ahead of the average users," he said. However, "people are learning, and I think that is having an effect."

Full article at:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,138002/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

Friday, October 05, 2007

Antivirus vendors are closer to agreeing on a new way to test their software after widespread agreement that older antivirus tests can be misleading.

Antivirus testing groups have typically tested antivirus products by running the detection engine against hundreds of malicious software samples. If the product doesn't detect a sample, it gets a lower ranking. The style of evaluation tests whether an antivirus product has the right "signatures," or indicators that can identify a specific piece of malware.

Full article at:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,138112/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

Saturday, October 06, 2007

Most users today simply delete spam email from their inboxes, in part because they don't have a simple tool for reporting spam to their ISP. The SignalSpam project aims to provide them with such a tool. "From the French perspective, spam is like any other criminal activity that is affecting the French people," Graham-Cumming said.

Full article at:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,138120/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

Saturday, October 06, 2007

On Thursday, compromised pages hosted by the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Superior Court of Madera County, California, were still hosting inappropriate content. Brookhaven had links that redirected visitors to pornographic Web servers, and the Madera County court site featured ads for porn and Viagra.

The U.S. federal government took steps earlier this week to shut down Web sites in California in order to protect the public from hacked Web sites, but new incidents show that the problem is not going away any time soon.

Full article at:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,138151/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

Back