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McAfee got Final Report on the SPAM Experiment

The McAfee team has recently completed an analysis of all data from SPAM (short for spam constantly All month) and one report is available. Entitled "Global SPAM Diaries", the report contains detailed and comprehensive presentation of all the McAfee findings.

Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee comments: "What I have gained over the last 30 days? Well, at least my itch of this template that curiosity, click on each and everything about World Wide Web just to see the result. Clearly a click of the moment in the window or signing up for diet advice in the form of a newsletter, as expected foolish. I will continue to be more diligent payer much more attention when I enter my personal email address and my contact information."

People from ten countries took part in the experiment (5 each), and depending on the McAfee report of the United States came in the early rankings. U.S. participants were given a total of 23233 spam messages that are about 22% of the total amount of spam received during the entire month. Brazil and Italy came in number 2 and 3, but the difference between the two is rather small (Italy needed only 246 messages to catch up to Brazil, which has a total of 15856 messages). Germany came in last with only 2331 messages, or 2%.

With respect to the participants, Bill on the U.S. came in number 1, 9160 with a total of spam messages. Giuseppe of Italy and Brazil on Geraldo came in number 2 and 3. Just as in the country rankings, the difference between the second and third place is too small. Geraldo needed only 490 more spam messages to catch up with Giuseppe which have a total of 6490. At least spam participant was John from Australia, which have a total of 3759 messages.

All that the amount of spam led to all kinds of malicious software installed on their machines and a significant reduction of computing power.

Guy Roberts, director of AVERT Labs: "Many of our players noticed that their computers were slowing, this means that while they were surfing, unbeknownst to them, Web sites were installing malicious software. In fact that in only 30 days they commented on noticeable change in the power of their computers demonstrates how much malicious software is installed without the knowledge of innocent people. "

The experiment began on 1 - Your May 2008 and a total of 50 people took part in it. In the McAfee team instructed them to leave aside all precautions and surfing the web. Of course laptops and electronic addresses are generously provided by McAfee. The purpose of the experiment is to see how many spam messages will be received for a period of 30 days and how that will affect the consumer.

No Comment | Posted in » McAfee, security, Security news, spam  

McAfee warns about possible exploits

Hack and spammers seem to work popular in an attempt to search for vulnerabilities in various applications. It appears that the recently discovered used to try to take advantage of one unpatched Adobe Flash vulnerability. According to one post yesterday of McAfee AVERT Labs, the security company has received a number of samples used by many different sources of spam domains.

McAfee were samples of these allegations very seriously and began investigations on the matter. It seems that while you browse the sites that serve these SWF spirit McAfee found a link leading to mass recently reported hacks. As in early May reported attacks infected sites, reference external script, which for this new Adobe Flash-related vulnerability appears to be one SWF file. Apparently this SWF file leads to a similar name WIN% 209,0124,0 i.swf (WIN 9,0124,0 i.swf). The file is now offline.

McAfee is unable to confirm that this last SWF file is an attempt to take advantage of the aforementioned Adobe Flash vulnerability, but Symantec, referred to the same domain to serve the earlier exploit. Besides the opening of Symantec, without mentioning any other domain and 2 spirit implies called WIN% 206,0,79,0 ff.swf (WIN 6,0,79,0 ff.swf) and win% 206,0,79 , 0 ie.swf (WIN 6,0,79,0 ie.swf), also offline.

McAfee draws three conclusions from all of the above files. Apparently, the various spirit are built for different versions of Adobe Flash, namely 9.0.124.0 and 6.0.79.0, which are quite old. Versions of operating are suspected to be either available or under development and is expected to focus on other operating systems except Microsoft's Windows. The latter conclusion is that it uses specially designed for the two most used Internet browsing applications, namely Internet Explorer and Firefox.

At present there are no more details available for this security vulnerability, but McAfee promises to provide consumers with more information, as the investigation moves along.

No Comment | Posted in » adobe flash player, Flash, McAfee, vulnerability  

Best Windows Security - 2008 edition

In search of better antiviral 2008, has put forward one step further, courtesy of security solutions testing laboratory AV-Test.org. The entire best available security suite 2008 edition was thrown against more than 1.1 million samples of malicious code at the scene Windows XP SP2. At this point in time, with XP SP3 is around the corner, the results released by AV-Test also valid for the third and final package of Windows XP, but not the same is true for Windows Vista (plus Service Pack 1) platform.

In fact, the tests have been designed to assess a wide range of aspects to build together the puzzle in bulletproof security solutions. In the anti-virus software at the request had to detect malicious designs, adware and spyware, but also rootkits, and even actively identifying opportunities for unknown malicious code. And on top of this analysis are taken into account factors such as productivity, the amount of false positives generated, response time, and cleaning capabilities.

"It is crucial to have good heuristics, common signatures and dynamic detection and prevention in place to be able to handle the new unknown malicious software without any updates. It’s extremely important to have good response time to be able to respond to new malicious program when the active mechanisms do not detect them. It is very important to have good detection rates static, as to be able to cope already known malicious programs, even before it was executed on the same system. Example that compares the characteristics of one makes less sense, we must think about that the user has not acquired AV product found viruses and report them, but he really bought the service keep its system malware-free," Marx added.

The list continues with the rest of the antivirus test with 30 security solutions. On detection rates of malicious software, as well as adware and spyware for Trend Micro 98.72% - 95.14%; Sophos 98.10% - 98.83%; Nod32 (Eset) 97.85% - 96.33 %; Microsoft 97.79% - 91.50%; BitDefender 97.77% - 98.77%; Kaspersky 97.17% - 92.02%; Norton (Symantec) 95.70% - 98.62%; Panda 95.62% - 95.57%; McAfee 95.58% - 98.56% etc.

Sophos quickly to celebrate their victory over rivals Symantec and McAffe. "Sophos continues to innovate and improve the methods used to protect against viruses, Trojans, spyware, adware and other threats. It is especially gratifying to see Sophos praised for having" very good "when it detects an unknown malware," said Guy Edsall, a product Sophos manager. "Sophos has received high scores across the board. Combination of these wonderful opportunities related to the protection of Sophos in the underlying philosophy of governance was a mere driver behind many companies, the transition from Symantec and McAfee for Sophos."

The results for the Anti-virus evaluation test of current anti-malware products, March 2008 edition, are offered via Sunbelt Software here, here, and here. With the original Excel spreadsheet from AV-Test up for grabs here.

No Comment | Posted in » Antivirus, Avira, McAfee, symantec, windows