Did you know: -

• 1 laptop is stolen every 53 seconds in the USA.

• On average, the cost of preventative measures is 4 times less than the cost of a breach.
• Over 600,000 laptop thefts occur annually, resulting in an estimated $5.4 billion loss of proprietary information.
• $55 Billion annual computer virus damages to U.S. businesses. [Encrypted files can not be infected by viruses].

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The Company entered into a License Agreement with PMC Ciphers, due to its high speed of encryption and its immunity against Power Analysis Attacks – i.e. hacking – on low to mid range micro process controllers. The polymorphic system is hardened against practical attacks such as brute force and represents an advance in encryption technology.

In 1999 Bernd Röellgen patented a Polymorphic Encryption technology based on his ‘Polymorphic Method’ and this was immediately classified by the German government as a state secret. Later that year in an attempt to encourage e-commerce the German government declassified all of its encryption technology, allowing PMC-Ciphers Inc. to develop its disk encryption software and distribute 8 million copies worldwide.

Röellgen’s patented Polymorphic Encryption technology is able to create ultra-fast, ultra-strong ciphers that are extremely adaptable with no theoretical or practical way to reconstruct keys from plaintext. His method comes with a comparable number of ‘data keys’ as with conventional symmetric encryption methods. However, it adds a significant amount of possible and equally probable algorithmic keys, thus yielding substantially higher security and speed.

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UK magazine Computer Shopper have rated Microsoft’s new Security Essentials 1.0 anti-malware package as top-of-the-class with regard to free antivirus solutions. In the February 2010 edition of the magazine, which brings product news, computer help, tests and analyses new technologies, and runs competitions, Microsoft’s offering was awarded the Budget Buy award and rated with four stars; the same score as AVG 9.0. As we’ll go on to see further down, Microsoft’s product has a smaller footprint and is much more environment-friendly than AVG.

(You may wonder why it was given a budget buy award when it is free: Well free appears to me to be a decent budget!)

Computer Shopper claim that their specialised anti-virus testing lab is one of the best in the world, and a member of AMTSO. (Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organisation.) They use viruses downloaded live from the internet as malware samples, rather than having a cumulative collection of virus-samples that may have mutated considerably since the sample was collected.

In short; they test using XP Professional with the SP2 service-pack applied, and ensure that the anti-malware solution under test is updated with the very latest available malware definitions.

The anti-malware solutions tested were both free and paid products. In the category of free products were: -

• ALWIL Avast! Home Edition 4.8

• AVG TECHNOLOGIES AVG Free 9.0

• AVIRA AntiVir Personal 9.0

• MICROSOFT Security Essentials 1.0

The lowest-scoring of these was Avira AntiVir Personal. In summary the magazine said that although it was easy to use, they were very disappointed at its poor web-threat-detection, as well as its unreliable automatic updates.

Second from bottom, but yet in third place, came Alwil’s Avast! Home Edition, which has loads of features and provides a good all-round malware defence. – However others did a better job.

AVG 9.0 was released while CS were testing, and despite having an unfair advantage in a number of ways, the product continued to hold its own among the best free security software available, coming in second-place out of the four.

In first-place amongst the free-category was Microsoft’s Security Essentials 1.0. Computer Shopper’s summary verdict was that it was lightweight, easy-to-use, and accurate. They said that Security Essentials was the perfect choice if you’d rather not shell-out on a paid-for security suite.

So although AVG had an herein-unspecified ‘unfair advantage’, it was nevertheless beaten back to second-place by the cream-of-the-crop from Microsoft. Why was this?

Taking a look at the stated minimum hardware specifications required to run the 2 solutions might give us a clue as to at least a part of the reason: -

• AVG requires Windows 2000, XP (Pro or Home, 32 or 64-bit),Vista (32-bit or 64) or Windows 7 (32 or 64-bit). At least a 1.8GHz processor is recommended, along with at least 512MB RAM and 550MB disk-space.

• Security Essentials, on the other hand, isn’t quite so demanding: Security Essentials isn’t built for Windows 2000 or XP 64-bit, so users of those versions of Windows will have to use AVG. – All others that AVG will run on are recommended though; that’s XP 32-bit, Vista 32 and 64-bit, and 7 32 and 64-bit.
•  

         Unlike its resource-hungry rival, Security Essentials requires lower specs to operate, indicating that it has a much smaller footprint: It only needs a 500MHz processor, for instance, it only requires a minimum 250MB RAM, and will operate comfortably within 150MB disk-space.

Another thing CS stated about Security Essentials that gave it the edge was that it “rivalled the best of the paid-for anti-malware suites.” : It ended up with an overall-score of 18/19, having failed to protect against live-malware on just one occasion out of 19 attacks. The software didn’t interfere with or delay the running of any other software either.

Microsoft’s previous attempt at anti-malware; namely Windows Live One-Care, was rather lame; but this time round, the softies have done themselves proud.

I myself have written a number of positive comments about Microsoft Security Essentials; one or two of them on this blog itself. Apparently it appears that everyone else is doing the same; which can only mean that Microsoft have yet again excelled themselves with an excellent product, worthy of the accolades bestowed upon it.

Logging in on someone else’s computer isn’t a wise move – Here’s why:

Let’s look at this fictional example: -

The unusual situation that you find yourself in one day is that your computer’s not working for whatever reason, and your laptop or netbook or iPhone is already in for repair. – Therefore you have no computer of your own available. – But your friend very kindly offers to let you use theirs for a session, just to get your pressing business sorted out in the interim until you can get online.

You arrive at your friend’s house, and after swapping pleasantries you sit at their waiting computer and log in to your important accounts, such as your bank, email, Twitter, etc, see to your important pressing matters, thank your friend, and after another coffee, you start out merrily on your way back home.

The following day the geek you phoned for help the day before gets your desktop working again, and you also are informed that your other hardware is ready to pick up and working perfectly. – But when you attempt to get the money from your bank account to pay for the repairs, you find that your balance is in the red. You also find that you can’t log in to your email account, and someone’s spamming Twitter using your account.

Someone has possibly stolen your identity. Definitely they’ve hijacked your Twitter and email accounts, and stolen all your bank balance. – All just at the worst time that you could have had it happen to you.

How did it happen?

Spyware Woes

Since your friend’s machine is a computer that you don’t normally have control of; you have no idea whether or not keylogger spyware on that machine is recording every keystroke you make and sending resultant data to hacker somewhere on the planet. Your friend had no idea that their machine was so infected either, until all their own accounts were hacked into as well. Other types of spyware were also recording which sites and web pages you visited, for how long, what passwords you used…etc, and the criminals raced each other to see who could get a hold of major parts of your entire online identity first.

… But spyware is not the only worry you would have in using someone else’s computer for personal business: -

Browser Memories

In the browser, form fields in particular, the same ones that you enter your banking account ID and passwords into, are remembered. Sometimes they’re remembered automatically, along with the password entered. Therefore someone could possibly see your user name, select it, and be able to login to your account with your password on the computer you’ve just used: Whether it’s your friend’s machine, a public computer, or even a retailer’s box.

Malice Aforethought

- Even your best friend’s little geeky brother, or sister even, could log on as soon as nobody was watching, enter the username that they overheard in conversation, and have full access to your account(s) from the passwords that the browser remembered.

Let’s not forget, it’s fairly easy to purposely install software or set up browser features to record your user name and password automatically. – So if you don’t trust the computer’s owner 101% then this is a particular reason to not use their machine to log on to your personal accounts. – Even if – in fact especially if – they offer to pay you to do so.

On the other side of the coin the person who allows you to use their computer also can get stung with accusations and/or probing from you and from the authorities during investigation into the crime. – I assure you that this will strain even the strongest of friendships up to or beyond breaking point in many cases.

- So, if necessary, let others who won’t listen to your explanations use terminology about you such as “tight”, “selfish”, “stingy”, “mean”, whatever. – It’s a lot better to have some shallow half-brained person insult you than to lose everything.

I have to admit I laughed when I heard the name Norton mentioned in a video warning of fake antivirus products. (Norton’s makers were supposed to be the heroes; but whether or not you share this opinion, I was unaware that heroes could produce end products that were so bulky and ineffective.)

Sarcasm aside; criminals are infecting their victims’ PC with fake antivirus software which cons them into handing over their credit card details.

Symantec, producer of Norton, claims that  victims actually download the rogue security programs intentionally because they imagine that it will help keep their computers safe from viruses and other internet threats. The word “gullible” comes to mind. (If Norton was capable of keeping their computers safe from viruses and other internet threats they’d have no need to bother with replacements.)

(I truly am trying not to be sarcastic; but it just isn’t working.)

This type of malware can get onto your PC via anything from porn sites to online banking sites; probably all of which have been hacked, especially in the case of the latter. – But there are websites out there that are maliciously seeking to infect you nevertheless.

Symantec claims that it’s identified over 250 types of the rogue software. Believe it or not there are actually affiliate networks behind the distribution of this untimely crapware!: –

Con Mallon, Product Marketing Director for Symantec, told the UK’s Computer Shopper magazine: –

"We found a number of affiliate networks that we were able to monitor and see how they were operating. We know how much the affiliates are paid per installation. Some people earn $23,000 per week, which comes to over $1m dollars per year. People go looking for security software and end up on fake sites. Pop-ups fool them into thinking there’s a problem and they panic-buy the software."

While a lot of the legitimate affiliate networks pay you peanuts (Google Adsense) for results, and then try to take what little you’ve made back by some method or another in the form of “non-productivity fines” and the like; (Clickbank I’m talking about you now.) these illegal affiliate networks are paying decent commissions, so is it any wonder that people are distributing these pieces of crap everywhere by whatever means they can? In short it’s a situation created by the legalised greed and extortion of the corporate companies.

Fake anti-virus software looks incredibly convincing to the non-tech-savvy computer-user. – That’s part of the reason why I, and other tech-bloggers like me, run sites like this one: To try and educate the masses who haven’t yet bothered to learn, in addition to assisting those who are learning, and to create a homely place for those in the know to come and discuss all things tech interactively.

Computer Shopper magazine infected a system in its dedicated virus testing lab and created this video: - 

Have you personally fallen foul of any of this type of malware, through a compromised website, or other means?

Incidentally; if you use Windows and want a proven FREE anti-malware suite from Microsoft themselves that really does the business, tested and verified by me personally, then look no further: Click here. –Yes it’ll work on XP, Vista, and Windows 7 – 32 and 64-bit.

Last Thursday came an acknowledgement from Microsoft that it had made an error when writing Windows, which had led to a security hole being left wide open in the code associated with its Server Message Block 2 file-and-print-sharing protocol which ships with Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008.
Read more

“Patch Tuesday” is the day every month when Microsoft released their Security Bulletin Summary for the respective month.

This month (October 2009) there are important updates for Windows 7 (RC) and Windows 7 64-bit (RC), as well as security patches for Windows XP and Vista (32 and 64-bit) – So whatever Windows operating system you’re running, you’ll need to download and install the relevant free updates ASAP, if you haven’t already done so.

Why should I patch my system?

Read more

It appears that today is anti-malware-day on kkomp.com: So I’ve written a bonus article, because I really do recommend that you use this free software: -

As you may or may not know, I’ve been plagued with viruses over the last few days. Fortunately the infection has now been dealt with; thanks to Microsoft Security Essentials. When I became infected, my antivirus solution provided by Avast! simply didn’t see it. Malwarebytes was oblivious to it also. – Yet there was definitely an infection, as my system was spewing out spam emails to all on my contacts-list, as well as to non-existent addresses that the worm was probing by creating the address itself and seeing if the mail was delivered.

AdAware from Lavasoft managed to find a keylogger, a backdoor Trojan, and the worm itself. I thought that the problem was sorted at that point, and went merrily on my way singing joyfully and blogging crazily. The following day I activated my email client, then switched on the 64-bit box, as well as the external hard-drive. My email inbox was soon swamped by hundreds of “Message Undeliverable” emails. The worm was back!

How? I cleaned both boxes with AdAware, I formatted the external hard-drive, including all the backups, and made a fresh backup. Nevertheless I did it all again, and the system stopped sending spam. I ran 4 different programs on all drives of both machines. All reported that the system was clean. Imagine my horror when two days later the system started sending spam again!

I’d recently been reading an article on PC Mech.com, entitled “Free Anti-Virus From Microsoft Is Now Available”. This gave me an idea: Microsoft earlier dropped its Windows One-Care program, and promised to replace it with something a bit lighter. This was the promised product; just out of beta.

My thinking started to run along the lines of: “Well it’s a new antivirus solution, it’s from Microsoft, it works with Windows 7 64-bit as well as with Windows XP 32-bit; both of which I run, and it’s best of all FREE, which means that it won’t hurt to give it a try. – There’s definitely a problem somewhere on my system that everything I’ve tried so far is missing; so let’s give it a whirl.”

I isolated the box running XP 32-bit, removed Avast! free-edition from it, and installed Microsoft Security Essentials. I set it to auto scan in 1/2-hour . To cut a long story short it found 4 pieces of malware, which it rated as a severe threat, and removed them. Upon reconnection; after I’d isolated the Windows 7 box, having installed Microsoft Security Essential on it, no spam. Yay!

I ran it on the 64-bit Windows 7 box. – It found the culprits: Two instances of Trojan downloaders: ASX.Winmad.AN, and ASX.Winmad.CJ. It deleted the infected files, which had been downloading various malware infections and distributing them over my LAN. – Target neutralised: I’m now virus free.

I can’t speak too highly of Microsoft Security Essentials. It’s a glowingly-excellent piece of software from the softies. Microsoft Security Essentials was the only free antivirus solution that was able to both see and clear the entire virus-infection and fully clean my system. Most other solutions couldn’t see any infection at all, and those that did didn’t get to the root of the issue. Microsoft Security Essentials, however, did the business and completely solved the problem.

After that glowing report, let’s get back to reality with the nitty-gritty: -

Microsoft Security Essentials is extremely thorough: On its default setting it scans everything, and I mean everything. It looks inside zipped archives; personal, program, and system archives, byte by byte: .CAB files and the like are no longer safe places for malware to hide. If it does then it will die by being detected and eradicated bit-by-bit.

Being so thorough; there are obviously limiting factors.

The first of these is time: Microsoft Security Essentials is fast; there’s no doubt about that, but it does so much work that it’s no faster than any other antivirus solution of a similar type. I found that on my box running 64-bit Windows 7 with a 3-core AMD Phenom CPU running at 2.3GHz and 8GBs DDR2 800MHz RAM, Microsoft Security Essentials managed to scan about 50 GBs of data an hour.

The second is heat: With such a colossal amount of calculations being processed at a quite incredible speed, the processor would have a lot of work to do, and therefore produce heat. This antivirus solution, running a full scan, is no laughing matter. I have a feeling that a single-cored processor of 1.8GHz or less would have problems with it. Indeed, from personal experience, I had a lot of programs running at the same time as the full-scan was happening on my AMD Athlon 64×2-powered box, running 32-bit XP Professional at 2.3GHz with 2GBs DDR2 667MHz RAM, and the processor usage went so high for so long that the thermal-trip shut the CPU down before it fried. Running Microsoft Security Essentials on its own caused no such problem though, and the scan was slower than on the 3-core Phenom, but totally effective nevertheless.

As you’ll see from the white CPU-usage graph in the top-left corner of the picture of the readout from Glint system monitor, above, the processor usage can be quite large. This readout was from the Athlon 64×2 XP box with only Microsoft Security Essentials running.

One other thing: If you’re running 64-bit XP; and that’s probably not a lot of you, as 64-bit XP can be a nightmare as far as drivers are concerned, there’s no version of Microsoft Security Essentials for your operating system. Microsoft Security Essentials has versions for 32-bit XP, 32-bit Vista and Windows 7, and 64-bit Vista and Windows 7.

Have you tried out Microsoft Security Essentials yet? If so then what do you think of it?

What are botnets?

Botnets are a collection of thousands – sometimes millions – of mainly home and office computers that have been compromised by malicious software which allows then to be taken over and externally controlled in a mass distributed-computing criminal operation, giving the controllers masses of computing power and internet access. Botnet is short for robot network. The member computers of this network can be used by the controller(s) to accomplish almost any operation; including distributing and relaying spam, porn, stealing sensitive information, participating in DDoS attacks, etc.

How do botnets operate?

Malicious botnet software operates silently in the background, running with full privileges and utilising the computers’ resources. A Trojan horse may invisibly hold a port open so that the botnet controller can instruct the machine in what to do. Other rogue software may post millions of copies of spam emails, black-marketeering, fraudulent and illegitimate financial transactions, as well as reporting all the legitimate user’s personal details, including bank details, account passwords, as well as any business information – Even sensitive information from political organisations or Government officials, should their personal computers become compromised, to the controlling criminals.

A botnet will never inform you that your computer is a member; in fact a botnet will do its utmost to hide that fact. A recent estimated figure of 30 million computers; known as “zombies”, are unknowingly involved in a botnet network. Botnets spread by means of email, p2p, network-aware viral infections, and a number of other methods including directing a user to a malicious website where they are encouraged to click on a link that downloads the malicious code which will get them set up to run as part of the botnet. Once a computer is so compromised the botnet will almost instantly spread across any connected Local Area Network or LAN.

Basically all you need to do is be cynical about what you see online, practice safe computing, and use common sense. – If you do then you’ll be at far less risk of ever unknowingly joining a botnet.

- So how can I avoid becoming a part of a botnet?

Be careful. Don’t open any emails claiming to be from eBay, PayPal, banks or the government. Never click on email links to access suspect sites. If you feel compelled to take a look at the alleged website; Google for it and see if it is legitimate before typing the correct URL into your browser manually.

Always keep your computer up to date with genuine security patches issued by your operating system’s creator; especially if you use Microsoft Windows. It may help to use a spam filter to help in discerning malicious email. Keep your anti-malware programs updated and do not click on dubious links: If in doubt simply don’t click on it. Beware of offers that seem too good to be true: they probably are. Always suspect unexpected emails with subject tags related to holidays, celebrities or current events. Never buy anything from a spammer.

Normally a decent updated antivirus/antispyware program will protect your computer from most types of known botnet-associated malware. However, if your computer appears to be behaving strangely in some way then it’s always a sensible idea to run a scan, both from your regular antivirus software and other online sources. In the case of Windows, the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool supplied online every Patch Tuesday will also search for and eradicate the major forms of this type of threat when installed and run.

You’re going to start again with a new setup. Your old faithful machine is too old and is wearing out. Perhaps you’ve been running Windows XP on it for years. Maybe you tried to upgrade it to Vista a couple of years ago, but the hardware wouldn’t have it and something crashed; so you reinstalled XP and stuck with that. Now the machine’s showing intense signs of old age: It’s slow and it BSODs too much, the hard-drive is making funny noises, the PSU fan is so noisy it sounds like a prop-plane, the capacitors on the motherboard are bulging, the DVD drive stopped working months ago, the processor is an old 32-bit single-core chip… It’s just far too much hassle to renovate. There’s a new operating system coming out soon; Windows 7, which it won’t run but which you want to use.  It’s time for a whole new setup.

Out goes the old machine onto the driveway, ready for the trash collectors to take away… STOP!

You’ve just discarded your entire identity onto your driveway for anyone who wants to steal it to use. All the data on the hard-drive is accessible by anyone who knows how to get it. – And that’s a surprisingly large number of people, incidentally. All they need to do is remove the hard-drive from the computer, or, even easier than that, pick up the whole machine while nobody’s watching; take it back to their pad, remove the hard-drive, connect it up to another machine, and your identity is theirs.

“Oh no, I’m cleverer than you think: My user account is password-protected and I’m using the NTFS file system.”

Password protection? That’s an easy one to deal with: Here’s one way to get past it. Who was it that said that “A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing”?

You need to erase your hard-drive for your own security’s sake.

- Or maybe you’ve just been given a new setup for your birthday, so you’re going to sell your old one on eBay, or see if someone locally will buy it off you.

You need to erase your hard-drive for your own security’s sake.

Maybe you’re just replacing the hard-drive itself: Removing the old drive and replacing it with a larger drive, then selling the old hard-drive on eBay?

You need to erase your hard-drive for your own security’s sake.

-So how do I do that?

A reformat of the drive before you remove it, (Having first backed up any data you want to keep.) is the most basic way to do it; but you might not be entirely satisfied that this operation alone is secure enough. Often; although the drive can’t be instantly inserted into another computer and read as if you hadn’t bothered, it’s sometimes not that hard to recover at least some of the previous data using very basic freeware data recovery tools after a reformat.

There are a number of programs out there that will overwrite the data on your drive repeatedly with random characters. This can make the data virtually impossible to recover using even the most sophisticated data-recovery techniques. Personally I use Webroot System Eraser. This is a handy dos utility that I have a copy of on floppy disc as well as a copy burned to CD. It’s bootable, so you can simply boot from floppy or CD and set it to overwrite everything on as many discs as you like with random data which is generated by the program a number of times. There are many other similar programs; some free, which operate in a similar fashion.

Don’t deliver your sensitive data into the hands of criminals. Erase your hard-drive(s) before you dump or sell it / them.

I don’t steal people’s identities – fortunately for several people who’ve given or sold me their old hard-drive; neither do I blackmail companies or sell their sensitive data to scammers and spammers – fortunately for a company who sold me a batch of their old hard-drives on eBay.

I’m a tech; so I’m bound to have more opportunity to get hold of a hard-drive that somebody forgot to erase, surely? True, but I don’t generally use old hard-drives these days. I bought an old 10GB  IDE drive on eBay 3 years ago to replace the 1.2 GB IDE drive in someone’s ancient computer that was on its way out. (Surprisingly the computer, which was originally built for Windows 95 or 98 I believe, (It had had its AGP graphics card upgraded to 16MB and its PC133 RAM increased to 250MB at some point.) did run Windows XP Home, and fairly well too.) I also purchased a lot of redundant 40GB SATA hard-drives back in 2007 on the cheap to use in test-machines that I quickly knocked up for trialling software. I still have at least 1 of the SATA HDDs left; probably with an installation of Windows 2000 on it too, just like most of the others in that job lot I bought.

- What I’m saying is that if I get the odd live one now and again, then so, probably, does anyone else who’s bought secondhand hard-drives. …And people wonder why there’s so much crime! For some of the more unscrupulous types of people it would be like a red rag to a bull! – And there’s no bull in saying that either.

On Wednesday 3rd June 2009 I noticed a page about this site, kkomp.com, on browserdefender.com. On this page it says that there’s an unsafe download on this site; a file called gpu-z.exe.

I’ve never put gpu-z.exe on the site; so I tried to download it myself, and sure enough it’s downloadable from the site’s root directory. Despite this it doesn’t appear on the ftp server, and I can find no trace of it other than the fact that it can be downloaded from this site.

I advised the hosts; fasthosts.co.uk, (I was going to change the hosting after their last act of customer-unfriendliness; but it never happened.) of the situation, and they said that they’ve never had this situation before, that they’d put an engineer straight on the case, and that they’d get back to me by email. What they actually seem to have done is absolutely nothing: Sweet F.A.

I thought I’d have a look at this file myself; and downloaded it. First things first; I scanned it.

A scan by AdAware came up negative:

A scan by Malwarebytes came up negative: -

A scan by Avast! antivirus also came up negative… So now I’m wondering – more than I’m wondering why a file that doesn’t exist according to ftp is available for download from the server, more than I’m wondering how Fasthosts have the nerve to charge more than some other hosts, yet do almost sod-all; Where is the freaking risk?

According to Malwarebytes, AdAware, and Avast! (Which is a good antivirus at coming up with false positives incidentally.) there’s no infection. – So have browserdefender.com come up with a false positive themselves? Having said that; the ftp server at fasthosts.co.uk says that the subject file doesn’t exist; yet I’m able, nevertheless, to download it. (I’m not even going to think about running the risk of actually running the file just in case.)

So WTF is going on here?

Well, in short, it seems to be something of nothing. (Literally in some ways.) The best advice I can give you on this is: -

Don’t download gpu-z.exe from this site’s root directory. If you do download it then bear the following points in mind: A) The file has nothing to do with me: I did not put it on the server. B) You download it at your own risk, and I am not responsible for any consequences of your doing so. (If you need someone to blame; fasthosts.co.uk would be a good place to start.)

I could have said nothing about this matter unless someone emailed in and made a fuss: In some ways that may have been an equally good option. – But I prefer the pre-emptive strike tactic; hence this article.

Strangely, browserdefender.com also have pcmech.com; a site that’s just gained BBB Accreditation in the USA, that has a much higher search-engine, Quantcast, etc, rating than this site, and has over 10,000 visitors a day, marked as an unsafe site too. I bet David Risley, the owner, won’t be too amused!

I get the uneasy feeling that I may be overlooking some glaring fact that’s obvious to some others. If this is indeed the case; and you know more than I do, then please comment: There’s a comment form below, so someone may as well make use of it.

Onwards and upwards: Enjoy the coming week. I’m going to spend the rest of today (Sunday June 7th 2009) mainly watching TV I think.

Despite the claim by Mac users that their operating system is safer than Windows and much more secure; there is a chink in the armour. No, I’m not referring to a Chinese knight; I’m actually referring to something that would better be described as a gaping chasm rather than a chink: There’s still a large security vulnerability in Mac OS X with regard to Java; and it’s never yet been patched by Apple. It’s already been patched in both Windows and Linux.

According to kdawson, writing on slashdot.org: -

"Security researchers say that Mac OS X users are vulnerable to a critical, 6-month-old, remote vulnerability in Java, a component that is enabled by default in Web browsers on this platform. Julien Tinnes notes that this vulnerability differs from typical Java security flaws in that it is ‘a pure Java vulnerability’ and doesn’t involve any native code. It affected not only Sun’s Java but other implementations such as OpenJDK, on multiple platforms, including Linux and Windows. ‘This means you can write a 100% reliable exploit in pure Java. This exploit will work on all the platforms, all the architectures and all the browsers,’ Julien wrote. This bug was demonstrated during the Pwn2own security challenge this year at CanSecWest, but the details were not made public at that time. Tinnes recommends that Mac OS X users disable Java in their browsers until Apple releases a security update."

Here’s how to disable Java in your Safari and FireFox browsers in Mac OS X: -

If you still need Java access, I suggest that you install NoScript into FireFox. (See also.)

To disable Java in Safari on Mac OS X, click the Safari tab in the menu at the top right of your screen. Click Preferences in the drop-down list. In the Security section of the preferences window, uncheck Enable Java.

To disable Java in Firefox on Mac OS X, click the Firefox tab in the menu at the top right of your screen.In the Content section of the preferences window, uncheck Enable Java.

It appears that Mac users are deluding themselves that Macs are more secure than PCs: Just because something gets attacked less doesn’t mean it’s more secure.

Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security, suspects that  Microsoft won’t issue a patch to protect Mac users of their PowerPoint software this month on Patch Tuesday: -

Despite the fact that a bumper crop of patches is expected, it appears that users of PowerPoint for the Mac may be left out in the cold.

"We don’t have the PowerPoint for the Mac patches," he said after reviewing the advance notice.

On last month’s Patch Tuesday, Microsoft patched the Windows versions of PowerPoint, but not the Mac editions, saying that it didn’t want to hang onto the update while waiting for Mac fixes.

The PowerPoint bug in Windows has been the subject of attacks by exploit code since April.

Jonathan Ness, an engineer at the Microsoft Security Response Center, said last month: –

"None of the exploit samples we have analyzed will reliably exploit the Mac version, so we didn’t want to hold the Windows security update while we wait for Mac packages,"

On June 4th 2009, Microsoft stated that it will deliver 10 security updates on its June 2009 Patch Tuesday, to patch serious bugs in Windows, Internet Explorer (IE), Word and Excel. According to sources it is apparent that 6 of the 10 patches are to be marked as "critical," while three will be rated as "moderate" and one as "important".

Mary Landesman wrote an article on About.com, which brought up some interesting points. Three different free antivirus solutions were tested: AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic, AVAST 4 Home Edition, and AVG Free Edition. Of these; AVAST! (Which I use.) fared the best, detecting 92% of zoo viruses. AntiVir came second with an 85% detection rate, and AVG was in last place with only 81% detection rate.

When it came to being fast at releasing updates against major threats though, AntiVir was tops, with Avast! in second place, and AVG once again lagging behind in last place.

Although all three solutions claim to give protection against spyware and adware, they’re all fairly lousy at doing so. Avast! was again the best; despite scoring only 33%. AVG was yet again in last place.

As with everything else, you get what you pay for; so if you need an active all-round security suite I personally recommend the paid-for Kaspersky Internet Security Complete Protection , which has in test after test proved to be one of the best security solutions on the market. Linux users and geeky types may prefer NOD32/Eset Smart Security, which is also one of the best out there – Although I personally found it to be a bit bloated when I tested it last year (2008) in November.

I remember back in the days in the 20th Century when I was running Windows 98SE I had Trend PC-Cillin installed, (Not free) which failed to detect a particularly virulent virus which subsequently infected my system and disabled all protection. I installed a different paid-for solution, (I forget the name of it.) which the virus couldn’t disable and which detected and killed the virus. That goes to show that no antivirus solution; free or paid-for, is infallible.

I’ve always scanned with Lavasoft AdAware on a weekly basis anyway. – So if anything is missed by Avast! then AdAware; probably the best anti-malware solution I’ve seen, even topping Malware Bytes, will remove it.

What antivirus or security suite are you using? How would you rate it? Please comment.

Added 16th December 2009: Since I wrote this article a new free antivirus solution from Microsoft; namely Microsoft Security Essentials, has been released. In the opinion of myself and other testers; all other free antivirus solutions suck in comparison, and I strongly recommend that, if you’re not prepared to pay for an antivirus/malware solution, you download and install Microsoft Security Essentials

When it comes to keeping your computer free of malware; Microsoft do their bit to help their customers out: There’s a regular schedule of update releases from them known as “Patch Tuesday” on the second Tuesday of every month, there’s also an updated Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool released as a critical update along with the other patches every Patch Tuesday. There’s Windows Defender, and there’s also the late Windows OneCare and it’s successor – All from Microsoft.

- But do remember; Microsoft are not an anti-malware vendor. Although the patches issued on Patch Tuesday are released with the intention of enhancing the security of your computer’s operating system that they provided; they are in reality only corrections of errors that could lead to a security-breach that Microsoft missed when they originally designed the operating system: What they’re not is magic bullets that will keep your system safe. The Malicious Software Removal Tool won’t stop malicious software infecting your computer. It’s a post-infection measure, designed to detect any serious malware infection that exists on your machine and warn you about it: Nothing more.

If you want to view the results of previous scans by the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool ; click Start>Run and type:

%WINDIR%\debug\mrt.log

Windows Defender is a defender of Windows against certain forms of malware; but it’s not infallible. Windows One Care was designed to replace an entire security-suite; but its effectiveness was questionable. Personally I’d rather use a rival product any day; but that’s academic now as it’s a doomed product. If you’re still using it, (If you can still use it.) then I suggest that you get rid of it and get a different security suite, as it’ll stop updating soon if it hasn’t done so already.

Get an antivirus/antispyware solution from an anti-malware vendor. You don’t have to pay for it if you don’t want to either: I recommend Avast! for a free one: It’s quite possibly more effective than a few of the paid ones that I could mention. I recommend Kaspersky as one of the best paid ones

Prevention is better than cure; so keep the malware out in the first place rather than letting it in and dealing with the mess it leaves afterwards.

Also; whilst Microsoft have enhanced the Windows Firewall fairly recently; I suggest that you only rely on that alone if you’re running your computer behind a router, which acts as a hardware firewall. – Otherwise I suggest using something with a little more bite to it.

Plus, of course, always practice safe browsing: If unsure then don’t click it.

Nasties can only get in through an open door. Keep as many doors as possible closed and put guards on those that are left open by necessity. – That way nothing nasty will get in.

Has your machine ever been compromised? Please comment.

A lot of your data is probably sensitive; such as security-codes, passwords, PINs, bank details, credit card numbers, etc. In addition to that there may be other data of a personal nature on your computer that isn’t meant to go public.

When you back-up your hard-drive, (If you don’t then you should or you’ll regret it one day.) all of that is copied onto your backup.

If you back-up online; your data is normally encrypted by your computer using a 256-bit algorithm before being sent to the online-backup server. Anyone trying to intercept it online will receive a scrambled nonsensical mess that could take thousands of years to decode. It’s stored in the servers in encrypted format too; so if you need to recover data it’s returned to you encrypted, and your computer translates it using an encryption key stored on the hard-drive inside the relevant online-backup company’s software.

So your online backups are fairly secure in-transit across the internet and in storage. It’s your home backups that are a security risk: Imagine returning home one day to find that burglars have raided your house and stolen your computer with all your personal details including your personal data decryption key on the hard-drive. Not only that but they’ve stolen your external hard-disk with your backups on it too. You may nave an online backup facility; so if that is the case then you haven’t lost the data. However criminals now have the original copy of your data; and who knows what they’ll do with it? Maybe steal your identity, raid your bank account, even impersonate you online and take over your blogs.

You could encrypt your entire disk and store the encryption key on a USB stick perhaps: That’s a fine idea until you lose the stick, or it becomes damaged on your person. You could do likewise with your backups, with the identical risks.

The easiest way to deter the issue is to use a removable drive-caddy on your computer. Fit the caddy/ies so that your main disk(s) are removable; and when you go away from home for extended periods, remove them and put them somewhere secure, such as a bank-deposit-box or something, at another location, along with your external hard-drive with your backups on it. Then, if a burglar steals your computer they’ll discover that they can’t even boot it up; and when they finally realise what’s going on they’ll still not have your data even if they do get it working. All you’ve lost is the physical computer itself; but your data is safe.

It may seem like a lot of extra hassle; but it’ll give you a lot of extra peace-of-mind.

This security-related article has been issued as an extra to the scheduled articles on kkomp.com .

Adobe are currently under attack by shedloads of malware and have recently become the number 1 target. They’ve just had to issue an urgent update for their flash player, after a remotely exploitable vulnerability resulting in code execution with user privileges was discovered. Read this security advisory.

Having read that; the best course of action is to upgrade your flash program to 10.0.22.87. If you can’t or won’t do that then there is also an update for Flash 9 to version 9.0.151.0 for Windows & Mac, and 9.0.152.0 for Linux. (For unsupported operating systems.) Please update all browsers that you are using and have Flash installed on.

Your system is always targeted. 

Also having vulnerabilities of script injection attack are RoboHelp7, 6, Server7,  and Server 6 on Windows.

At least Microsoft are in effect getting a breather. It seemed only a short while ago that Adobe were untouchable: But why should Microsoft have all the fun?