The discovery was first reported by Websense on their website and several anti-virus applications have already been updated to counter this attack.

The interesting aspect in my opinion is that hackers are very quick to react on global events that trigger lots of searches for a specific subject in a short time. It took them less than 24 hours to prepare hundreds of websites with the malicious Javascript code and make it into the top 10 for several related search terms.

The Why is obvious. There is always a massive increase in searches when events that are of global interest happen. This can be assassinations, wars or catastrophes for example. The more users search for a subject the higher the chance that they will land on a prepared website.

Protecting yourself:

Here are some thoughts on how to protect your computer from falling into this trap.

• Use the excellent Firefox add-on NoScript which disables Javascript on all websites except on those that you whitelist.
• Visit trustworthy news websites only. The problem here is that you might miss good articles written by bloggers or new websites who rank highly on a subject. If you have to visit those sites be prepared. Turn of Javascript and other scripting languages before you visit those sites.
• Keep your operating system updated. This is one of the most important rules. Update your system with the latest security patches
• Don’t use Internet Explorer. Switch to another browser for increased security
• Don’t log into Windows as an administrator

Can you think of anything else ? You could use a virtual PC or a tool like Sandboxie whenever you surf the Internet.

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According to their statistics which are updated when scanning computers 10.90% of all PCs scanned were infected. PCs with Antivirus installed had a infection rate of 8.62% while PCs without Antivirus were infected 14.56% of the times.

Infected or Not displays the rate of infected PCs using a Google Maps mashup. France for instance is the country in Europe with the highest amount of infected PCs (16.41%) while Sweden (4.17%) and Germany (5.33%) have the least amount of infections. The United States has an infection rate of 10.34 btw.

The scan works with Firefox after installing an add-on which can only be uninstalled from the default installation location which is at C:\Program Files\Panda Security\NanoScan. Execute the file nanounst.exe to uninstall it again.

Antivir reported a trojan during installation and execution which can be considered a false positive. In case you are wondering why I have Antivir installed, I did not test this from my main computer.

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The program is easy to download and install which is also a plus, just download, double click on the downloaded tool and you are ready to go. You have the option to include different languages, the source and add windows explorer and outlook integration. I´am not using Outlook so I removed this option and left everything else untouched for now.

The user interface is a basic one, you don´t have all the nifty graphics most other antivirus programs use. Clam is simply in that way, but its also fast due to this. I don´t care about looks if a program does what I expect it to do, but I know there are lots of people who like a resource eating monster like Symantec Internet Security more than a freeware program without the cool animated effects.

You have lots of configuration options, you can set filters, email alerts, schedule scans and use a proxy for the automatic internet updates if you like. Automatic updates are a great plus for Clam, my current antivirus software that I use (AVG) does not have automatic updates, you have to start the updates manually which is a great hassle. Especially when you don´t know if there has been a update at all.

What I don´t like about Clam is that its only having a plugin for outlook which is the most used email software of course but should not be used by anyone serious about making his pc more secure.

I can recommend Clam Win especially to users of Microsoft Outlook and users who tend to forgot to check for internet updates of their antivirus software. Resources accessed are minimal which is also a good thing for an anti-virus product.

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