Spyware Hunter

Comodo recently announced the release of Co1modo BOClean 4.23. Building on Comodo’s latest acquirement of the assets of Privacy Software Corporation (PSC), the launch is consistent with the re-release of the PSC website under the Comodo brand. Similar to all of Comodo’s security product, BOClean 4.23 can be availed free by end-users.

The users can install the BOClean on single PC or over a network and can also customize for any network or institutional condition. The app has been brought about to be a foil for usual anti-virus apps by testing executable files right ahead of they sprint. The BOClean subsequently checks its database of 278,000 malware signatures and at once destroys the procedure if malware is spotted. Thus, BOClean gives an additional layer of security by grasping any virus, Trojan, or malware that has previously run off the other active guards installed by a user on his/her system.

The Comodo BOClean reinforces the Comodo’s promise to protect the desktop for free of charge. Other gratis solutions are: Comodo Antivirus; Comodo Firewall Pro; Comodo iVault; Comodo Anti-Spam and Comodo Backup.

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Recently a US $1b lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., which is said to be opening up an innovative front to combat spam. Not only the spammers, but those who gather e-mail addresses for spammers, have also been brought within the reach of the latest lawsuit. One of the biggest of its type, the lawsuit is being filed from Project Honey Pot members in more than hundred nations. Project Honey Pot is a service offered by Park City-Utah-enabled anti-spam company Unspam Technologies Inc.

A note posted on the Project Honey Pot Web site was reported to have said,

If you’ve harvested e-mail addresses or sent spam in the last two years, chances are you’re on our radar screen and we’re coming after you. This lawsuit is unique because we believe it is the first major case in the United States to bring a claim against spammers for harvesting e-mail addresses,” the note said. “While this practice has been a penalty enhancement under the CAN-SPAM Act since it was passed, in most cases the data was not available in order to prove an address was harvested.

The case is being tackled by Jon Praed, a founding associate of the Washington D.C-located Internet Law Group, which has symbolized and succeeded in anti-spam lawsuits for clients like Verizon Online and AOL formerly.

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Red Hat, open source purveyor, recently announced to have signed a definitive agreement to purchase privately held data management firm MetaMatrix, for an undisclosed sum of money. As per the details of the deal, MetaMatrix’s software is claimed to be integrated with JBoss middleware as part of a services-oriented architecture package.

MetaMatrix, located in Waltham, Mass., sells software for making access to different data sources. For instance, its tools are utilized to assist companies to generate a standalone “view” of a customer by getting info from many dissimilar databases. Red Hat maintained that it is planning to modify MetaMatrix’s business model to adapt it to the Linux seller’s open-source structure.

Red Hat is aimed at selling MetaMatrix’s products founded on an open source model, with revenues approaching from subscriptions, rather than the typical upfront licensing plan. The company is expecting to transition all of MetaMatrix’s software products into the open source model within a year.

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A Pirate is reported to have said that the European Parliament has voted for the latest report put forward by Italian parliament member Nicola Zingaretti that criminalize even efforts to intrude on copyrights.

Even though the latest order keeps out end-users from the law it will even then criminalize sites such as YouTube and almost all P2P services, and even the designers of these services.

The exceptions nearby the end-users’ personal utilization, comprises studies and research. Whereas the European Parliament in fact depicts the latest order as an effort to tone with the copyright laws of the European Countries being described by others as a lobby directive.

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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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