Archive for September, 2009
Indian Government Website Hacked
A second Indian government Web site – operated by the Institute of Remote Sensing – has been compromised for malware purposes, says Finjan Inc., one of the big names in secure web gateway products and a provider of unified web security solutions for the enterprise market. News that the site has been hacked by cybercriminals came after Finjan reported that the Government of India portal was hacked back in May of this year.
“This latest hack is interesting on two fronts. First the attack has happened despite the Indian government stepping up security on its hosting servers. And secondly, the cybercriminals have added a script into the site that adds an iFrame attack to the page,” said Yuval Ben- Itzhak, Finjan’s chief technology officer.
“The page then re-routes to a LuckySploit-infected server in Texas that fires off multiple attacks across the Internet. Early reports suggest that the site hack and re-route has infected several thousand Internet users,” he added.
According to Ben-Itzhak, the LuckySploit toolkit uses a variety of methods to infect users and is notable for using a complex encryption system to hide what it is doing. The bad news about this exploit is that the infected pages are only detected by 4 out of 41 anti-virus engines on the Virustotal.com code checking portal.
Finjan’s malicious code research team has notified the Indian CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) operation about the problem.
“More than anything, this infection teaches us that any site can be compromised and serve malicious code without the site owner knowledge. This is why Web protection utilizing real-time content inspection is needed for businesses to prevent such attacks and keep their valuable data away from hackers,” added Ben-Itzhak
“Individual users should also consider installing a URL-checking browser plugin such as Finjan’s free-to-use SecureBrowsing tool,” he said.
AVG Antivirus Now Available in Retail Stores
AVG Technologies, developers of the free anti-virus software has announced the availability of its various anti-virus suites in several large format retail stores in India. Operating in India through distributor, Milestone Interactive, AVG Technologies has made its products available at retail outlets such as Croma, HyperCITY, Reliance Digital, Vijay Sales, Landmark and P3.
AVG’s Internet Security will be made available at Rs. 1,999 for 1 user and Rs. 2,499 for 3 users, while the basic Anti-Virus package will be made available at a price of Rs. 999. AVG is also offering a unique product in Identity Protection – you can surf, search, bank, pay bills, shop and play online – safely – at a price of Rs. 499.
“The Indian customer is amongst the most tech-savvy in the world. In order to suit their needs we have developed a product range that uses groundbreaking technology to protect one’s PC while utilizing minimal resources, thus delivering value for money. And now, we have made this effective product range come within the grasp of millions of Indian consumers by harnessing the reach of these large format retail stores,” said Peter Baxter, Vice President – Business Development, AVG Technologies.
Jayant Sharma – Chairman and CEO of Milestone Interactive Group said, “It is essential for us to make AVG’s anti-virus products range easily available to our target consumers and LFRs offer us an ideal platform to present the range in a suitable manner. Additionally, these stores are very particular about their merchandize and insist on stocking only the latest and the best technology products. I am glad that AVG products compliment this desire.”
Google Suffers 2nd Email Disruption in a Month
Google Inc’s Web-based email service on Thursday suffered its second technical problem in a month as users reported difficulty accessing their contacts.
The disruption, which took 2-1/2 hours to resolve, followed a two-hour outage of Google’s news website this week. Earlier this month, a majority of its email users were unable to access the service for more than an hour after routers got overloaded during a routine server upgrade. The series of disruptions comes as Google tries to compete with Microsoft Corp and International Business Machines Corp by extending its services to business users – who are likely to be less tolerant of long outages.
Reports of the latest glitch flooded the Twitter microblogging site, with users posting comments highlighting and griping about the situation. “A problem with Google Contacts caused many Gmail users to experience slowness and degraded service for about an hour today,” Google said in a statement. “Mail was back to full speed for everyone around 8 am Pacific and the issue affecting Contacts was resolved shortly after. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.” Gmail already competes with Microsoft’s Hotmail and Yahoo Inc’s Web-based e-mail. Google offers its email service for free but also sells a version to businesses with extra features and technical support for $50 per user per year. Fear of outages, in addition to security concerns, has been a reason many businesses are wary of adopting “cloud computing” technologies offered by Google as well as Salesforce.com and Amazon.com, which help deliver data and services over the Internet.
Microsoft Says No Plans to Buy Electronic Arts – EA Sports
Microsoft Corp has no plans to acquire Electronic Arts, a Microsoft executive said, shooting down unsubstantiated talk of a potential bid that triggered a spike in the video game publisher’s shares.
“We have no plans to acquire EA,” Phil Spencer, corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios, told Reuters in an interview on Thursday. “They remain a very important partner to us. No acquisitions.” Spencer declined to comment on whether it had held talks with Electronics Arts on such a move. Shares of Electronics Arts jumped more than 8 percent on Wednesday on unsubstantiated talk that Microsoft may want to buy the video game publisher. Last year, Electronic Arts, the publisher of popular titles like “Madden” football, unsuccessfully pursued a buyout of rival video game company Take Two Interactive Software. The Redwood City, California-based company, which has a market value of $6.5 billion, is frequently named by traders as a target for Walt Disney Co and Time Warner Inc.
AVG Launches Free Protection Against Online Threats
AVG Technologies is launching AVG LinkScanner as a free standalone product to protect users against random, invisible online threats.
Everyday two million web pages are poisoned by hidden threats and 60 percent of those threats shut down or move to a different destination on the web making real-time link scanning crucial. Any type of site can be affected and if a user simply visits one of these poisoned web pages they don’t even need to click on anything to get into real trouble, to lose their credit card details, their ID or other valuable information or files. Regular anti-virus software alone cannot protect against this type of threat.
AVG LinkScanner gives users an additional real-time layer of protection apart from their existing security software. It works by looking at the web page behind a link or a web address typed into a browser and analyzing whether it harbors a threat. If it does, then AVG LinkScanner stops the user from downloading that page. This means that Windows XP and Vista users can now know whether it is safe to click on a link when they click on it.
AVG LinkScanner also applies this targeted analysis of web pages to search results from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Whenever users search using these search engines, they will see safety rankings for all ‘organic’ search results. In addition, the AVG LinkScanner will scan your bookmarks as well as links contained in instant messages and emails before you open them to ensure they are safe.
AVG LinkScanner’s ability to analyze web links in real time enables AVG to deliver more accurate and relevant protection than other safe-surfing solutions. AVG LinkScanner analyzes individual pages on a web site to generate a rating for those pages.
“The Web has become the primary distribution mechanism for viruses (and other malware), drive-by downloads and other stealthy web threats which represent vast majority of attacks,” said AVG Technologies CTO Karel Obluk. “So we’ve evolved our product range to put greater emphasis on combating this more insidious and dangerous form of attack. AVG LinkScanner is at the front line of this additional protective layer. It’s our goal, by making this layer freely available, to give users the confidence to always feel safe when they go online.”
AVG’s “neighborhood watch” approach to AVG LinkScanner research also increases the product’s ability to provide relevant protection to users – putting the protection where users actually go and when they go there, rather than trying to map and secure the entire Internet.
The software is free for use on any personal home computer for non-commercial purposes. It can be downloaded from http://linkscanner.avg.com . Support is available through a free online forum hosted by AVG at http://freeforum.avg.com
AVG LinkScanner runs under all current versions of Windows XP and Vista, both 32- and 64-bit. The software is compatible with all major security software and with Internet Explorer 6 or later and Firefox 2 or later browsers and is available in English.