The Security Intelligence Report is a biannual report by Microsoft that analyzes past and present security trends. It focuses on “software vulnerabilities, software vulnerability exploits, malicious and potentially unwanted software, and security breaches”. The latest report published yesterday focuses on the first and second quarter of 2011 and compares the findings with data from previous [...]

Categories: Microsoft, Security

If you have been following security news lately you may have already heard about the Duqu rootkit that combines the technology of the Stuxnet rootkit with a backdoor trojan and keylogger. Duqu has been discovered on October 18 and infection reports have started to come in soon thereafter. Not all security suites and products detect [...]

Categories: Security, Software, Windows

About two weeks ago word got out that the Chaos Computer Club got their hands on what they identified as a German state-sponsored trojan. The initial analysis assumed that the trojan would only run on 32-bit Windows systems. We reviewed a software that would detect the trojan on the system. Two weeks later things have [...]

Categories: Security

I have monitored news about the alleged German state-sponsored trojan closely ever since the German Chaos Computer Club posted information about it online. While there is not a definitive proof that it is indeed malware designed and operated by German police forces, it is definitely something that computer users need to be aware of. I [...]

Categories: Security, Windows

Security and operating system companies have been very successful in the last year of taking down major botnets, networks of malware-infected PCs that can act in unison under remote control to perform distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks and send huge volumes of spam email.  Now a new botnet, named TDL, has been discovered that is very [...]

Categories: Security

It’s been over a decade now that we’ve had secure socket layer (SSL) encryption technology for making Internet transactions safe. With only a very few exceptions, including a certificate cloning scare a couple of years ago, it’s worked very well and has enabled millions of people online to perform trillions of online purchases and financial [...]

Categories: Security, The Web

The Cleaner was back in the days one of the few solid programs to clean malicious software from a Windows computer system. It somehow seems to have lost its appeal to many users even though the developer’s claim that it is the fastest anti-virus solution with best virus detection rates available for the Windows operating [...]

Categories: Security, Software, Windows

The first step to recover a computer system after a malware infection is the malware removal. This is usually done by the security software that is installed on the system. Some security software programs do a great job of removing malware but fail to remove traces that the malware has left behind. That’s where IClean [...]

Categories: Security, Software, Windows

Dante send me a link to another “malware found on purchased laptop” story. The new M&A Companion Touch netbook contained three pieces of malware: An USB worm, a rootkit and a World of Warcraft password stealer. These things seem to happen regularly and it is not only laptops that are affected by this. We have [...]

Categories: Security