Spyware Hunter

A New York teenager has been accused of hacking into AOL and pilfering database records of its customers. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office complained against seventeen-year-old Mike Nieves for suspected PC tampering, PC trespass, and criminal possession of computer material.

Nieves purportedly burglarized AOL’s PC network between December 24, 2006 and April 7, 2007 and made access to databases having customer billing records, addresses, and credit card info. He is also accused of infesting systems at an AOL customer support call center in New Delhi, India, with a program to funnel info back to his PC.

The complaint also charges that Nieves accessed and pilfered other people’s AIM instant messaging accounts, made an attempt to burglarize an AOL customer support system and busy in a phishing attack against AOL staff. Nieves, who was accused this week and stays in custody, face four felony charges and one offense charge. His suspected acts cost AOL over $500,000.

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SecureMac recently announced to have come up with MacScan 2.4, the newest update of SecureMac’s industry primary anti-spyware package for Macintosh computers. The SecureMac team is aimed at making available a protected and trustworthy product to the Macintosh community. MacScan 2.4 is claimed to make available many vulnerability fixes and augmentations over MacScan 2.3.1 to the company’s flagship security software.

Ahead of buying MacScan, the Macintosh community required more time. As well as, in the spirit of Macintosh accessibility, Internet file-cleaning selections are now said to be protected, and are simple to be reprocessed on forthcoming scans. The latest version is also said to patch up many problems detected in previous versions, with enhancements to the elimination of Firefox tracking cookies, as well as enhancements to the way MacScan claims to eliminate tracking cookies from all browsers.

The latest updates from prior versions of MacScan 2 can be had at no cost, and by either selecting “Upgrade MacScan” under the “MacScan” menu, or making a download of the demo version from Securemac .

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LANDesk Software recently announced the unveiling of its Host Intrusion Prevention suite, a behaviour-based security monitoring, alerting and remediation offering. Host-enabled intrusion prevention systems is said to rise above usual anti-virus software in giving protection to PCs founded on the system’s behaviour. The Host Intrusion Prevention system boasts of protecting from rootkits, zero-day threats and other malware, as said by Landesk.

Dissimilar to the signature-enabled scanning technology utilized by famous anti-virus and anti-spyware deliverances, Landesk’s toolkit technology does not depend only on previously present signatures and pattern files for detection of malware. Rather, it makes use of rules-enabled technology that looks at network traffic and machine behaviour to make out incongruities or occurrences of security policy breaches founded upon pre-defined rules fixed by security and IT administrators.

The Host Intrusion Prevention kit is included with security-augmenting potentials like application access control with the help of white listing, and file behaviour analysis and security via policy-enabled remediation. It is also said to be delivering immediate spying of machine start-up commands, rootkit finding and elimination, and finding of uncertified clients and Internet servers.

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HCL Infosystems recently announced the a new technology, which boasts of reduce time and space to get back lost data. Speaking high of the latest technology, HCL purports that the built-in constancy and control technology covers 0.07% of hard disk space to bring about snapshots. Plus, the EC2 photographs the complete system within the similar hard disk drive but for generating a different partition. To be availed in ‘HCL Non Stop Series’, the EC2-based notebooks are said to be capable of getting back all data lost while system collapses within a minute.

A few of the normal tribulations that can be tackled by EC2 are: system down at critical moments, unintentional file/folder removal or overwrite, system corruption caused by viruses, spyware or Trojans, unintentional formatting of any of the hard disk partitions, corruption of registry files & folders, blue screen errors, system breakdown after patch updates, uninstallation of software and apps, system breakdown on being deployed latest software/application and OS collapse due to virus attack. The technology gives support to Microsoft Win XP and Vista operating systems. EC2 is said to handle all the info on the local hard disk. No third-party media is needed to sprint HCL EC2.

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Considering constant attacks of hackers, McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro, the three leading security vendors are joining forces to enhance decades-old methodology, which is now seen as an insufficient defense against the internet-borne threats. They are said not to be discarding signature-based defense, which needs detecting a specific malware sample to generate a matching signature so as to spot and remove it. A few of the latest methods being devised by them are going to be unveiled as products this year.

Brian Foster, Symantec’s senior director for product management, who notes the security firm receives 200,000 submissions of potential malware each month, was quoted saying,

Everyone agrees signature-based defense is not enough. The number of variants is increasing.

With the aim of enhancing signature-based detection in its next enterprise anti-virus release set to be brought out this summer, Symantec is intended for incorporating white-listing technology for policy-enabled control of apps down to a software-component level. Foster says that this avant-garde malware protection as of Symantec is also claimed to make use of behavior blocking that boasts of stopping as a minimum a few malware from executing, holding it ‘in a unmoving condition on that system.’ The three leading giant claims that the core of their strategy is that they will change the game.

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At the recent Infosecurity Europe 2007, security experts came up with the warning of hack attacks and data theft, which are being made simpler with the utilization of out of sight executables and an ultra-modern variation on the microdot spying technique. The security expert said that the 1st attack of the attacker is to put in an executable malware file in a Word document, which on being opened breaks down the PC and the malware is automatically laden while the PC reboots.
This technique is said to be cunning, as anti-virus product are not capable enough to find out this type of attack. Many legacy Word code is said to be ready for this type of attack. It is the attack vector of choice for hostile intelligence agencies and professional criminals.

The 2nd method is a variation of the conventional spying technique of microdotting, where info is snapped and condensed to the size of a dot and pasted into a document. The latest method seems to be equivalent, however makes use of text boxes in Word docs. Confidential info can be pasted into a text box and after that the box is condensed and positioned in the doc to bear a resemblance to a punctuation mark. However anti-virus purveyors are confident that present security systems would prevent the 1st type of attack.

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The volume of hacking attacks has been so deep and sound that when it is carried out the affected party is encountered with a huge amount of irreparable losses. The hackers with the aim of fulfilling their malicious monetary designs renders affected party handicapped and crippled so much that some times it gets really very difficult retrieve the losses.

The same is the case here that I am going to talk about, recently hundreds of websites power-driven by St. Catharines-based YourNameSells.com, comprising dozens of businesses and non-profit groups in the Niagara area, were rendered useless when a hacker rubbed out key operating files from one of the company’s servers prior this month. Comparing to one time attack, this is touted to be the biggest attack executed by any hacker so far. The affected party is reported to have been saying that the hacking attack has almost killed them with the irreparable losses born out by them.

YNS client Jay McKnight, who owns Jay’s Pro Power, a Welland-based power-skating program, was quoted as saying,

Right now it’s affected me tremendously, and I have a hockey school that starts in about a week and a half. It hasn’t killed me, but I’m sure I’ve lost five to 10 clients, McKnight says of his website outage. While it averages just five or six hits a day, that’s a “major” number for a business his size.

He maintains that by the grace of god, his small business is also sponsored by flyers and tittle-tattle from those in the Welland Minor Hockey circle. Jayspowerpro.ca generally makes available comprehensive info regarding his programs and camp. It’s a website that YourNameSells hosts for a $25 monthly fee, but which can be self-edited by McKnight.

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Hackers are trying to swindle consumers into making purchase of software, which claims to be genuine anti-spyware apps. There are at present four phony security suites on the market for each one genuine product, download site Snapfiles told Vnunet.com. This bogus software is masked as genuine to users whilst giving bogus scan results, un-succeeding to wash up the system of current spyware and intermittently deploying malware onto the user’s computer itself.

In accordance with Harvard Business School assistant professor and spyware researcher Ben Edelman, bogus anti-spyware product is a big problem with another download site, Tucows, also revealing Vnunet.com that it thinks the mass of security products to be bogus. Data from the Federation Against Software Theft, which was set up in 1984, depicts that British companies have coughed up over £1.8m in penalties for making use of unlicensed apps to the Business Software Alliance.

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OfficeMax recently announced to have rolled out a novel remote tech support service known as ctrlcenter, which is aimed at helping its customers in the way of Best Buy’s Geek Squad and Circuit City’s firedog. The service mainly consists of remote services; dissimilar its two rivals, it does not make available on-site visits or drop-off services. What it performs is to let technical support personnel gain access to distant PCs in getting rid of viruses and spyware, deploy software, and carry out other services.

Ctrlcenter presents patch-up services at 8 dissimilar price points, starting from $50 to $500. The latest service is also consisted with a Web site, ctrl-center.com, which can also be reached via www.officemax.com. OfficeMax earlier tried out with a home tech-support service known as MaxInstall, which was introduced in 2004 however afterward put an end.

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Websense recently announced to purchase rival SurfControl, in an all-cash transaction valued at $400 million. Websense Operations has given a total £201m, to purchase SurfControl. The mixture of the two firms is aimed at generating an IT security solutions company with the scale and product offering to vie more efficiently with large worldwide security software firms.

Both firms are known for proactive network security software to take off possible phishing, spyware, virus and other threats to IT systems. SurfControl provides 16m users worldwide while Websense serves 25m. The blend of the product offerings, in common with future product development plans, is said to enable Websense to put forward complete content security suites, with coated Web and email security and info leak prevention, optimized by customer size.

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