Posts have been appearing on the Internet lately by users of the antivirus software Avira Antivir. These users reported that they encountered update problems. The description was always similar. The Avira Antivir update would hang causing a permanent failure in the process which break the update capabilities of the software. Luckily though Ghacks reader Dante [...]

Most tech savvy users have their personal favorite when it comes to antivirus software. Be it security software from Kaspersky, Symantec, Trend Micro, AVG, Avira or Avast: Everyone seems to have a favorite that gets recommended to other users who inquire about the best antivirus solution. Lately, Microsoft has joined the ranks of recommended antivirus [...]

Microsoft’s new security software Microsoft Security Essentials has been getting some good reviews since the first public beta version got released by Microsoft. The security application is now available as a final version to protect computer systems from malicious software. The security program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Windows Vista [...]

So you have your Ubuntu server up and running with a Postfix mail server (see “Install Postfix for reliable email delivery“). You have also set up Postfix for antivirus with the help of ClamAV (see “Add antivirus to Post fix with ClamAV“). Finally you have Postfix set up to relay (see “Mail relaying made simple [...]

The Windows operating system keeps track of the most recently used (mru) files. Most Windows users do not know that and are surprised when someone points this out to them. This can be a privacy risk as anyone with access can access these file lists to see which files have been recently opened by the [...]

By now you have your Postfix mail server up and running (see “Install Postfix for reliable email delievery“). You even have relaying working (see “Mail relaying made simple with Postfix“). But one of the most important features you can add to a mail server is an system to prevent viruses from being passed to users. [...]

Flash Cookies, which are also known as super cookies or Local Shared Objects, should not be confused with normal cookies that are placed by websites. Normal cookies can easily be deleted from within the web browser. Flash cookies on the other hand are much harder to come by. They can store more information than normal [...]

If you are in a small business or a larger enterprise you know you need to keep track of all those machines. Sure you could easily tag and record them as they go from the box to the desk, but that doesn’t always happen. And the larger the company the more likely something is able [...]

Seems that some security companies and software developers are going crazy on the launch day of Microsoft’s new operating system Windows 7. Panda Security is the latest security software developer that will be offering one of its products for free on October 22. That’s right; Users who visit the promotion website on that day can [...]

In an interview with Vivian Yeo of Zdnet Asia Eugen Kaspersky stated that he would like to change the design of the Internet after being asked what he would change if he had the power to change three things related to IT security. According to him the biggest problem in IT security these days is [...]

Fake antivirus software programs, also called rogue security software, are programs that seem to be antivirus programs when in fact they are not. They either are disguised viruses, trojans or try to sale another product to the user. Like “normal” trojans rogue security software is often difficulty to remove from a computer system as it [...]

Yesterday’s incident (read Microsoft Silently Installing Windows Presentation Foundation Plugin For Firefox for pointers) brought up a question on how the plugin that caused the problems was installed it first place. Mozilla Firefox users with the Microsoft net. Framework 3.5 SP1 had the plugin installed without them accepting the installation of the plugin. This can [...]

I use secure shell a LOT, every day. So much so that I often take for granted how important this tool is. Not only does it allow me to log into remote machines to handle management of said machine, it can do other things as well – X tunneling being one of the most useful features. But [...]

If you have recently opened your Firefox web browser you might have noticed a notification from the web browser that the Windows Presentation Foundation plugin was disabled to protect the user and the web browser. Many users who received the message were a bit puzzled as they did not install the plugin in first place. [...]

SPAM. It’s a dreadful word that causes many a computer user to yank out their hair and wish their service provider would do a better job of keeping SPAM out of your inbox. But that is not going to happen over night. So…it is up to the end user to make sure they have extra [...]

Earlier this month we covered the release of the professional – in other words commercial – edition of AVG 9 and mentioned that the free version of the antivirus software would be released in a couple of days from the time of the review. AVG today has released the new version called AVG 9 Free [...]

Next time you visit an airport, there’s a chance of you being sniffed by, not dogs, but bees. Yes, they are now down to training bees to sniff and apparently it is proving to be extremely successful. While the cyborg beetles in my last post are still nowhere near practical implementation, these sniffer bees are [...]

Adobe has released a security patch for their Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat line of products that fix several security vulnerabilities that have been rated as critical. The vulnerabilities that have been discovered could cause Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat to crash which could potentially allow attackers to take control of the computer system. The [...]

Microsoft has published all security patches for today’s Patch Day a few minutes ago. The patches are available via Windows Update, Microsoft Update and the individual security bulletins that describe the nature of each security patch in detail. Windows users are encouraged to update their operating system and software programs as soon as possible to [...]

Remember last year? Zonealarm ran a promotion in November where users could grab a valid one year license for Zonealarm Pro Firewall. Seems that the promotion was a success as the devs are readying their website for this year’s promotion. The rules are simple. You need to visit the Zonealarm website – to be precise [...]

Remember back then when AOL decided to provide downloads of an anonymized snapshot of their search engine logs? One of the first things that Internet Marketers did was to analyze the data to see what users where looking for. Groups focused on privacy would analyse the data to see if it was possible to identify [...]

Adobe has posted information about a known critical security vulnerability affecting Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat on Windows, Mac and Unix operating systems. According to Adobe there are reports about a limited attack on the Windows versions of Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat 9.1.3 (and most likely earlier). A patch that is fixing the issue [...]

It is time to update the phishing protection article that we published some time ago (see Phishing explained) with the recent news that thousands of Hotmail users (and apparently Gmail users as well) fell pray to yet another phishing scam. What is phishing? Phishing, which stands for password fishing, is a popular technique to get [...]

Security software companies like Symantec, Kaspersky or AVG are releasing new versions of their software programs every year. This year will be a special year though with the release of Microsoft’s new operating system Windows 7 on October 22. Many users will now not only ask about the new features and improvements of the antivirus [...]

Microsoft has recently confirmed that thousands of Windows Live Hotmail customer’s credentials were exposed on a third party website. According to Neowin the account information were posted by an anonymous user at the pastebin website. The list that was posted contained over 10.000 account details of accounts starting with the letters A and B which [...]

Security. Ah, security. It’s the make or break for administrators on so many levels. For the Linux operating system you could go in so many directions with your security. You could go the graphical front-end and make life easy but lose some flexibility. Or you could go the far more challenging route and use the [...]

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser is tightly integrated into the Windows operating system. This makes it an important software program even if the users of the system do not use it as their main web browser. The reason for this is that several other programs make use the Internet Explorer rendering engine. It is therefor [...]

Some of you might wonder why I’m writing about this topic again after publishing the two articles Microsoft Security Essentials Final Announced and Microsoft Security Essentials Final Available. The main reason for this third article originates from an article about SEO poisoning that was posted a few days ago at Websense. SEO poisoning describes a [...]

Let’s face it, sometimes it’s just too hard to get work done with so many distractions coming at you on your computer. Email, youtube, facebook, shopping – it all adds up to one huge time suck and threaten to perpetually keep you from your work.  There are times when I need to concentrate on work [...]

Most security software programs that are available these days provide protection against rootkits as well. There are on the other hand a few security programs that deal solely with rootkits. One of them is Trend Micro’s RootkitBuster which has just been released in a new version which adds the ability to detect rootkits that hook [...]

Microsoft has released the final version of their security software program Microsoft Security Essentials to the public. The software which has been released to a limited amount of beta testers earlier this year is now available for download at the new Microsoft Security Essentials website. The software program is provided as a 32-bit download for [...]

Many antivirus developers offer bootable rescue ISO images of their antivirus software programs so that users can use them to scan the computer system without having to boot into the installed operating systems. Shardana Antivirus Rescue Disk Utility combines antivirus rescue disks and system tools (like partitioning programs or boot managers) in one ISO image. [...]

You’ve more than likely read Martins’ piece about the outstanding encryption tool Truecrypt “TrueCrypt 6.1 Released” and have used it to create easy to use, encrypted file systems on Windows machines. Of course TrueCrypt is also available for Linux as well. But what if I told you there was an even easier system to use [...]

I do a lot of work with secure shell. There are times when I am connected, via ssh, to multiple machines. Managing these connections can be a real hassle (especially when you have to try to remember numerous IP addresses). Sure you can create bash aliases to make these connections easier to remember, but if [...]

This article is not about illegal methods of obtaining software products. But read on if you are interested in how you can protect your computer with the latest antivirus software without having to pay for it. The principle is simply. Most antivirus companies are offering test versions of their products. These versions can usually be [...]

F-Secure Health Check is a web application that can perform a health check of a local Microsoft Windows operating system. A health check is basically divided into three areas of interest that are checked and an assessment in the end that lists possible solutions to the problems encountered. Area one will check for installed security [...]

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free security software that is developed by Microsoft. The security software was released as a limited beta to users in the United States, Brazil and China. It was (actually still is) possible to download the beta from download portals like Betanews without experiencing limitations. That’s what many users did and [...]

A friend recently asked me a bunch of questions about PC security. How dangerous email was, how people could attack a website and so forth. The answers to his questions led to this article which is not going to cover the usual PC security recommendations that always include using antivirus software, a firewall or malware [...]

I have espoused encryption on Ghacks plenty of times. I find most users do not employ encryption, of any kind, which is somewhat surprising given the constant rate at which data is stolen. With the help of encryption your data is much safer than it would be in plain text. To deal with encryption you [...]

We have caused quite some steer with our review of PeerBlock, a software program that would use blacklists to block IP addresses from communicating with the computer systems that were using the program. PeerBlock was basically a fork of PeerGuardian 2 offering a similar functionality and an active team of developers that would maintain, optimize [...]

For the Linux operating system there are plenty of possibilities when it comes to firewalls. One possible option is Firestarter (You can read my “introductory” article “Firestarter: Simple to use desktop firewall” for an example of one such tool). You could also get very granular with the command line tool iptables. Of course most administrators [...]

If you run any sort of server that is accessible by the public, you know the importance of certificate authorities (CAs). These certificates give your users a bit of insurance that your site is actually what it claims to be and not a spoofed version of your site waiting to either snag some data or [...]

Every PC needs protection. Even though the Linux operating system has a reputation for being nearly crack-proof, it is irresponsible to assume this true. Any operating system connected to a network is vulnerable in some way or other and having as much protection as you can is the only way to use a computer intelligently. [...]

Japanese mobile phone developers, companies and the recording industry of Japan are in talks currently to agree on new anti-piracy measures to fight music piracy in Japan according to the Financial Times. The proposed solution offered by the recording industry suggest digital rights management to be build into every mobile phone sold in Japan. The [...]

Computer virus attacks on a computer system can sometimes have undesired side effects that make it harder for the computer user to remove the computer virus effectively. This includes disabling the Windows Task Manager, Windows Registry or the command line tool. These effects are sometimes still in place after cleaning the computer virus, trojan or [...]

Microsoft yesterday released a security advisory that described a new security vulnerability affecting several Microsoft operating systems. The article, which was posted only a few hours after the release of security patches for this month’s patch-day affects the Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB) implementation. The operating systems that are affected by the new vulnerability are [...]

Microsoft has released the security patches for September 2009 which fix browser and web based attacks in various Microsoft programs and operating systems. All security patches have a critical or important security rating and are users who work with these software programs or operating systems should update them as soon as possible to protect their [...]

A computer worm is currently in the wild that is attacking unpatched WordPress blogs. Unpatched meaning blogs that have not been updated by their administrators to the latest version of the popular blogging software. The worm exploits a security vulnerability in older versions of WordPress to create a user account, make some changes to the [...]

Web browser attacks are an increasing threat these days. Attackers not only expoit web browser vulnerabilities but also those of plugins and add-ons that are installed in the web browser. The Adobe Flash plugin is one of the high priority targets of attackers due to its distribution percentage. A recent article at H-Online estimates that [...]

One of the many misconceptions about file deletion is the fact that files can be recovered even if they are deleted on the computer system by the user. Deleting files normally moves them to the recycle bin from where they can be recovered easily. But even deleting them in there or pressing the Shift key [...]