We're less than 1 week away from Black Friday, said to be the busiest shopping day of the year for brick-and-mortar shops and right at a week away from Black Monday, the cyber equivalent of Black Friday for online shopping.  These are exciting times for many folks but, for cyber criminals (I don't like to use the term hacker in a derogatory context, hackers aren't bad, cyber criminals are), it's quite literally hunting season.  We're already seeing news about new crimeware toolkits and phishing scams that the bad guys have at the ready (and already deployed) and we're going to try very hard to get the word out everywhere that we can to keep our customers aware and hopefully safe. To get things started, I got an article today about…

We are still seeing a large number of computers that are compromised due to outdated versions of Java (some still running Java 6) and Adobe products (Flash Player and Reader).  Your computer should be your next-to-last line of defense (the user at the console is the last line of defense) and needs to be properly secured against known threats.  The best way to do this is to make sure that you've got the latest software updates, especially the Microsoft, Adobe and Java updates.  Below is a brief list of the updates for November with links to their home sites with more information. Microsoft On the Microsoft side, the November Patch Tuesday will include 6 bulletins, 4 listed as critical, one listed as important and 1 listed as moderate. All of the…

Everyone,      Just wanted to touch base to let everyone know what was going on.  We get our news via feeds from a number of 'geek news' type websites.  When we see news that we need to pass along to you, we try to post it as quick as we can to get the information out there.  We were experimenting with a tool that would post the news directly to our news site but things got a little sideways.  We were able to pull the plug pretty quick but, before we did, there were several emails that had already made it out.  We have addressed the issue (and won't do that again) but I wanted to reach out and apologize for the deluge of SPAM.

Two questions that I suspect that we'll be fielding on this are a) why is that important and b) why should you care.  I'll try to quickly address both here but don't hesitate to let me know if I've missed anything. Why is that important?  Simply put, you've probably got Java installed and, unless you've updated it in the past 5 minutes (ok, that's an exaggeration, but you get the point), you're likely vulnerable to at least one of the many attacks out there.   Why should I care?  Again, simply put, Java is one of the biggest (currently ranked by Kaspersky as THE biggest) vulnerability being exploited by cyber criminals to install malware.   Now, the question that you likely didn't ask is what you need to do about it.…

This is a follow-up to my earlier article 'How do people make money off of Viruses' and is from an Internet Storm Center diary entry describing very simply what viruses do.  Basically, the author has noticed some questionable traffic on his network that the antivirus completely missed and, after some investigating, found that the virus on the computer was transmitting data to a server in the Ukraine every time the computer visited a website (think bank, gmail, etc.).  Further investigation confirmed that the virus was installed after the user visited a newspaper website that happened to have a poisoned ad displayed on it (starting to sound familiar?).  It's a very quick read and good insight into why it is so incredibly important to keep your computer up-to-date.   Article - http://isc.sans.edu/diary.html?storyid=14428

Ok, for the record, our stance on new Microsoft operating systems is (and always has been) to hold off until at least Service Pack 1 and let someone else find all of the undocumented features.  There have been a few exceptions here (Windows 98SE [yes, it was technically a new release and not a SP for Windows 98] from Windows 95, Windows 200 from Windows ME [uggggh, what a horrible thing that was] and Windows 7 from Windows Vista [or, as we refer to it, Windows ME2]).  All in all though, it's not a good idea to be an early adopter of a new Windows Operating System.  Window 8 is really no different and it should come as no surprise that Vupen has already found a zero day in the…

I saw this article today and it hit me that, dang, that would be an awesome tool to have from the antivirus, rather than having to try to go all CSI (from the article) to see what had been changed and, perhaps more importantly, how long ago it had been changed (2 seconds prior to the pop-up or 2 months ago, and it's been piping data to the attacker ever since).  There are server-side tools that can be installed to do this kind of thing (think tripwire and the like) but, for a simple workstation, I'm not aware of anything that will actually alert you when something was changed, only when it (the anti-virus tool) notices it.