Spyware

The ubiquity of computers, particularly home computers, has led owners to treat them like refrigerators or toasters — plugging them in, adjusting some initial settings, and using them until they break or until a different set of features is desired. This is a recipe for disaster because without education and the right security software, the end user doesn’t stand a chance.

January 23, 2008 (Computerworld) — Best Buy Co. has confirmed that, during the holidays, it sold digital picture frames that harbored malicious code able to spread to any connected Windows PC. It is not recalling the frames, however.

Do not download and run files obtained from unknown or suspicious resources. If you absolutely have to, make sure you scan the file with as many antivirus scanners as possible prior to running it; as an alternative, provided the file is small in size, send it for virustotal.com analysis.

Remember that files can equally be good or bad, and much of the outcome depends on the reputation of the source site. You’re pretty much guaranteed to get a clean file download from a known vendor such as Nvidia distributing new driver update, but at the same time face a huge risk when downloading a purported “codec” file from an unknown underground site. Typical malicious file would accommodate no more than 50K in size, so be particularly vigilant to such files.

Bake-off: Many AV Products Can’t Detect Rootkits

F-Secure, Panda, Symantec, and Trend Micro were the only AV packages that detected all 12 active rootkits in the test, and AntiVir, Avast, AVG, BitDefender, Dr Web, eTrust-VET, Kaspersky, McAfee, Nod32, and Sophos caught all but one rootkit. Microsoft missed two rootkits.