By John Gable, Director The security industry seems obsessed with detection. Who detects the most viruses? Do you detect 98% or 99% of all viruses out there? How well do you detect brand new viruses that are not yet on any virus list? 30%? Detection (and removal) of viruses is…
By John Gable, Director of Product Marketing AV-Comparatives.org, a highly respected anti-virus testing organization, recently released its 2009 summary report and awards (also see PC Mag article). Congratulations to the winners: Symantec, Kaspersky, and ESET (note that ZoneAlarm integrates Kaspersky technology for its anti-virus). Anti-virus (which generally also…
By Doctor Security Travel and Thanksgiving go together like turkey and stuffing. So if you’re like millions of others and going to be on the road or in the air this holiday season, we suggest you take some precautions to prevent the loss or theft of your laptop….
DNSSEC is a proposed protocol (introduced in RFC 2065) that would secure the DNS protocol using public key encryption, but its adoption has been slow due to many factors.
Confession: I get a little paranoid about security so I’m thinking through all the ways this could go wrong: the person in the next room is going to see all my Internet traffic because it is going over the airwaves like a cell phone call; the person in the next room will try to hack into my computer; the person in the next room will see my email address and I will get more spam…
The general idea is this: You’re surfing the Internet, you land on a Web site, and BAM! Malicious software secretly downloads to your PC.
By John Gable ZoneAlarm Director of Product Management Hardly anyone knew about it. The Los Angeles Angels website was recently hacked overnight with a drive-by download. It tried to download “AntiVirus 2009”, a well known fake security program that actually installs malware, onto visitors' systems. The Angels fixed the…
Zango is at it again, and again the good guys have prevailed. You would think that everyone would appreciate how security products protect users from dangerous, annoying or just unwanted attacks and content. But then again, you might not be a company “allegedly” doing “questionable” things. And if you were…
Some interesting links for this holiday week: The Credit Card Prank part II Destruction as art – CD data destruction device Hand operated travel shredder, no power required Sony to pay 1.5M for music CD rootkit debacle Newly released ePassport cloned in 5 minutes How much for a Windows Vista…
Wiley has allowed Ross Anderson to release his widely respected book "Security Engineering" online as a free download (server is under heavy load right now). While this book might be a bit in-depth for the normal computer user, many non-security type people still find it useful. For example, the chapter…
The combination of free email with anonymous classified sites (such as Craigslist) creates an environment ripe for con artists and opportunistic people to get information and meet others romantically, under false pretenses – called Social engineering. Wikipedia defines social engineering as "the practice of obtaining confidential information by manipulation of…
About a month ago, my wife’s and my debit cards started getting rejected at the stores. Maybe it’s just me but it’s an unpleasant experience. I feel like the cashier must be thinking what a loser I must be running out of money in my bank account and just can’t…
UC Berkeley carried out a social engineering attack (actually more of a prank) against the rival USC basketball team. The attack included: a star basketball player, a (ficticious) young lady named Victoria, and some Instant Messaging. Pretty easy and pretty funny. This story may not seem to have anything to…