Free antivirus started life nearly two decades ago as security’s poor relation, little more than a way of ensnaring users with limited features that would give them an excuse to upgrade to paid-for software later on. A number of software vendors built their marketing on such products, even if the bigger brands were sometimes too sniffy to dare offering something as lowly as a ‘free’ product.
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The latest MessageLabs Intelligence Report from Symantec Hosted Services is filled with interesting and useful information regarding the current state of malware and e-mail borne threats as well as the trends over time. Of particular interest to me is the assertion in the report that “any given Linux machine is five times more likely to be sending spam than any given Windows machine.”
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February 16, 2009 (Computerworld) A Kaspersky Lab technical support site was hacked late last month, exposing private customer information for 11 days, the Moscow-based security company admitted last week. The company learned of and closed the breach on Feb. 7 after it was notified by the Romanian hackers.
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Russian antivirus vendor Kaspersky Labs’s US website was hacked over the weekend, exposing the company’s customer database, but Kaspersky has denied data was compromised and says the vulnerability wasn’t critical.
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Proving that no company is immune to hacking, security firm Kaspersky Labs had its databases pried open by clever hackers.
If you felt a little bit foolish last time you were taken advantage of by a cunning hacker, give yourself a break: It even happens to the guys who know what theyâre doing. In what could be called the computer equivalent of a break-in at the police station, databases at the computer security company Kaspersky were hacked last weekend.
The company, known for its Kaspersky Anti-Virus suite, received a letter from hackers on Saturday morning warning of an impending threat before the site was hacked around noon, and restored by Kaspersky to an older version only minutes later, according to the timeline given by USA Today.
On the Portugese HackersBlog, a poster known as Unu demonstrated how he was able to gain access to Kasperskyâs databases using a technique known as SQL injection.
âHonestly, this is not good for any company and especially not good for a company dealing with security,” Roel Schouwenberg, Kaspersky’s senior antivirus researcher, told USA Today in a phone conference.
Though bits of data from Kasperskyâs internal databases were temporarily accessible to hackers, the company has assured users that their personal data was never breached.
Antivirus specialist Symantec has joined a security organisation alongside Microsoft, despite having previously come to very public blows with the software giant over its willingness to share security information on Vista. Announced at the RSA Conference Europe 2007 on Tuesday, Symantec and Microsoft will join the Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code (SafeCode), which claims to be a not-for-profit organisation aimed at increasing trust around IT. Other members include EMC, SAP and Juniper Networks.
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McAfee has announced that it will acquire certification vendor ScanAlert in a deal potentially worth $75 million. McAfee will pay $51 million up front for the Napa, Calif.-based company, as well as $24 million if performance targets are met. The acquisition is McAfee’s second in weeks. The company acquired encryption provider SafeBoot for $350 million on Oct. 8 to boost its enterprise data security offerings.
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Computer users should watch out for a talking virus that infects their machine, an anti-virus company has warned. The BotVoice.A Trojan uses the Microsoft Windows text reader to play the following: âYou have been infected; I repeat you have been infected and your system files have been deleted. Sorry. Have a nice day and bye bye,â according to anti-virus researchers at PandaLabs. The computer repeats the words, while the malware deletes the content of the computer hard drive.
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Hacking group warez has released a patch allowing gamers to run Halo 2 and Shadowrun, both released by Microsoft as Windows Vista-only titles, on the firmâs older Windows XP operating system. It had been claimed that neither title would be able to run successfully using the older DirectX 9 graphics engine, with Microsoft urging gamers to take the plunge and switch to the Vista.
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A man suspected of creating and spreading a mobile phone virus has been arrested by police in Spain, according to reports. The 28-year-old was arrested in Valencia following a seven month investigation by the Spanish authorities. The man is accused of writing and distributing over 20 different versions of the Cabir and Commwarrior worms, which attempt to infect mobile phones running the Symbian operating system.
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