malware

"Emerging" economies like China and Russia are going through this strong badware period. Research by StopBadware.org theorizes that lack of economic incentives for Chinese hosting providers and site owners to inform their users of infected sites and/or to take action to clean or remove these sites.

Full report (PDF)

Badware sites per million Internet users: China 689 Russia 307 United States 212 Germany 135 France 128 Republic of Korea 115 Great Britain 60

Via The Register

Ad-Aware has been around for nearly a decade and has been downloaded by hundreds of millions of people who want to scrub their computers clean. Publisher Lavasoft says that this edition includes better rootkit detection, faster updates, and other improvements. Check out what we thought about the latest version in this First Look video.

Published by: Bob; Boston

I have an XP Systemax unit that has worked flawlessly for two years. Until today. I checked my e-mail in the morning and noticed it was a little sluggish, so I rebooted--I admit, it had been a while since my last reboot. When the computer came back up, it was almost at a dead stop. Neither my ZoneAlarm nor AVG Anti-Virus would load. Any program I tried relating to anti-anything would not work, either.

After several reboots I was able to launch AVG and found hundreds of spyware files dumped on my system, from CoolWebSearch to … Read more

A fired Massachusetts state worker has been exonerated of a charge of possessing child pornography after computer forensics showed that his work laptop was infected with malicious software that was surreptitiously visiting illegal Web sites.

Michael Fiola, 53, was fired as a worker's comp fraud investigator with the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents in March 2007 after IT administrators found cached images of child porn in the temporary Internet files in his browser, according to the Dark Reading security news site.

Fiola, described as being "computer illiterate," hired a forensics expert who found the evidence that was … Read more

Published by Mesila; San Francisco, CA

I recently had unknown malware that was causing Windows to keep rebooting at odd moments. Another thing it did was install a kazillion services and then have all of them running at once. It wasn't something that any scanner would pick up--and being big on file sharing, I've made it a point to keep a whole army of antimalware programs around. I'm assuming the culprit was either one that was new at the time, or a variant that had morphed itself from an older version. Eventually, after a lot of fussing … Read more

McAfee released a study late on Tuesday that indicates the domains that tend to be the most dangerous or malware-prone on the Web, and at the top of the list is the Hong Kong (.hk) domain.

The McAfee Mal Web report, which serves as a safety guidebook to risky online neighborhoods, reveals that 19.2 percent of all Web sites ending with the .hk domain pose a security threat to Web users, followed by China (.cn), the Philippines (.ph), Romania (.ro) and Russia (.ru).

By contrast, the safest domains on the Web are Finland (.fi), Japan (.jp), Norway (.no), Slovenia (.… Read more

This year's major update to user favorite Ad-Aware looks to be more of a course correction from some of the missteps in the 2007 version. The adware and malware detection engine has undergone a significant overhaul, resulting in faster scan times, and the interface has been changed.

The changes to the detection and removal engine will be noticeable to long-time Ad-Aware users, with Lavasoft touting faster scan times and better rootkit detection. New users should notice that the app performs faster than integrated antivirus and antimalware programs, and that's because only the paid version of Ad-Aware comes with … Read more

Submitted by Scott, Vernon Hills, Ill.

This past April, a friend of mine, Jeff, called me on a Saturday afternoon, letting me know that I was instant messaging him right then. I obviously wasn't. He said that after some lines of basic text, I acted panicked and asked for money to be wired to an African bank account, which Jeff knew immediately was bad news for the real me.

I immediately changed some passwords in key accounts and found that my Hotmail account had been mysteriously compromised. The evildoers had got a ton of my contacts and sent out … Read more

Seventy-five million downloads can't be wrong, right? Phenomenally popular security program AVG Free has upgraded to Version 8, and Editor Seth Rosenblatt takes a first look at the revamp.

New features include a blessing of a new interface that's clean and easy to use, LinkScanner to minimize the risk of clicking on dangerous links during searches, and more.