Wednesday, April 14, 2010

“Mac users wooed with new antivirus product” plus 3 more

“Mac users wooed with new antivirus product” plus 3 more

Mac users wooed with new antivirus product

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 03:12 AM PDT

BitDefender has become the latest security vendor to announce an antivirus product for Apple Mac, confounding the received view that the platform is rarely vulnerable to such threats.

To Windows users, the different elements of Antivirus for Mac will be all too familiar. The software has a real-time threat engine to block the small volume of Mac-specific malware, a scanning engine to spot malware that might already have crept on to the system, and is claimed not to be too resource-heavy.

It also features the ability to spot Windows malware useful, BitDefender says, because Mac users should not pass malware to friends or colleagues using other platforms.

"Although Macs are traditionally believed to be safer, they are not more secure than any other computer or operating system. Also, malware writers are concentrating more and more on finding vulnerabilities in MacOS and popular Mac applications," reads the product literature.

The company claims there are "270 different threats specifically targeting Mac OS X operating systems, from JavaScript-based advertisements advising users to purchase fake antivirus software to DNS changing malware."

The company has a separate version for users of Apple Boot Camp, which offers combined Windows-Mac antivirus regardless of which environment the user boots into.

Apple users now have a small but slowly growing clutch of security vendors offering them antivirus software, generally the larger vendors plus a few larger independent houses. Kaspersky, PC Tools, McAfee and Symantec got into the market some time ago, while specialist vendors such as Intego deal exclusively with this sector. It looks likely that every vendor will soon have a Mac product because there are now enough users to justify the development effort.

What Mac users will not get is free Mac antivirus software. PC users have always had this option to some extent and it now looks as if the trend towards free products with basic protection is going to grow rapidly as vendors try to tempt customers with added extras such as backup, encryption and parental control. As ever, Mac users pay more for their choice.

BitDefender antivirus for Mac software costs £24.94 ($39.95) per annum and the Boot Camp dual-boot version £29.95 ($49.95) per annum, in line with the established PC versions.

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BitDefender releases antivirus for Mac, Boot Camp users

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 07:52 AM PDT

Wedford buzzed up: Fed boss has bittersweet message on recovery, jobs (AP)

8 minutes ago 2010-04-14T03:06:42-07:00

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

BitDefender Announces Mac Antivirus Solution

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 04:16 AM PDT

Wedford buzzed up: Fed boss has bittersweet message on recovery, jobs (AP)

8 minutes ago 2010-04-14T03:06:42-07:00

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Rogue Facebook ad redirects to fake antivirus software

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 08:42 AM PDT

A malicious advertisement has been found within an application for Facebook that redirected users to fake antivirus software, according to a security researcher.

The banner advertisement for greeting cards was intermittently displayed with an application called Farm Town, which has more than 9 million monthly users according to information published on Facebook.

If the bad Shockwave Flash advertisement was displayed, the user was redirected from Facebook through several domains and ended up on a website selling fake antivirus software, said Sandi Hardmeier, who studies malicious advertisements and blogged about the issue.

Farm Town's developer, SlashKey, has a notice on its website saying it has notified its developers of the problem.

"We believe at this time that it is harmless to your computer and a result of one or more of the ads on the site, but you should not follow any links to any software claiming to 'clean your system,'" the notice reads. "Most good antivirus/malware program will catch and quarantine this malware."

Hardmeier disagrees that it is harmless. "I'm disappointed that they are trying to minimise the perception of risk," she said.

The bad advertisement has since been pulled, said Matt Brummett, account manager at Adknowledge, the online advertising network that owns Cubics.com, which served the ad. The agency that supplied Cubics.com with the ad, AdSeven Media, based in the Netherlands, has been banned from their network, Brummett said.

Brummett said Adknowledge uses both technical and other checks to keep out bad ads, but on rare occasions the safeguards are circumvented."We have identified the breakdown on this occurrence, and it will be remedied," he said.

Fake antivirus sites usually tell users their computers are infected and implore them to download the software, which is often completely ineffective. Consumers are charged as much as US$70 for the software, which is also difficult to remove, and have trouble recovering their money.

There are hundreds of fake antivirus programs, and security experts estimate it is a multimillion dollar industry. Panda Security wrote in a report last year that as many as 35 million computers worldwide may be infected with fake antivirus programs each month.

Google's Chrome browser did detect the malicious domains used to redirect the user and blocked the attack. The company has "safe browsing" technology built into its browser that will block users from going to potentially harmful Web sites. Internet Explorer 8, however, did not, Hardmeier said. She was in the process of testing Firefox on Monday morning.

Hackers have been known to figure out ways to slip their malicious advertisements onto ad networks that supply advertisements to innumerable Web sites. Many ad networks have taken steps to ensure malicious ads don't circulate. But there are ways around using the ad networks.

"The bad guys are going straight to site owners and offering them advertising," Hardmeier said via instant message. "The responsible networks are monitoring for the bad stuff and catching it and will suspend the bad campaigns immediately."

Hardmeier said she notifiedCubics.com, which delivered the ad to Farm Town, and is in the process of notifying Facebook. Officials at Facebook could not be immediately reached.

Social networking sites such as Facebook are a prime target for scammers due to their high number of users and potential victims.

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