How malware and vulnerabilities get their names
You may have heard names like Cryptolocker or Heartbleed and wondered: Who comes up with these names? Why? The next question you may have is: Do all viruses and vulnerabilities get named?
Author Archives: Avast Blog
Showrooming this shopping season? Protect yourself with a VPN.
During Black Friday and the weeks leading up to Christmas, tech savvy shoppers visit brick-and-mortar stores to see the items they want to buy, but they use price comparison apps on their phones to check for the best deal. This is called “showrooming”. Shopping apps do things like scan barcodes for price comparisons between your local retailer and online stores, send alerts when the price drops, find money-saving coupons, and even tell which stores in the mall have a particular item on sale.
Block unwanted calls on your iPhone
Back in the day when families had one phone in the house, it was guaranteed that as they sat down to dinner, a telemarketer would call. Now that we carry our phones with us, we can be interrupted at any time by telemarketers, robocallers, scammers, pol…
Kevin Chapman joins as new SMB General Manager
Today, I am pleased to announce that Kevin Chapman has joined our team as Avast’s new General Manager of our SMB business unit. I have known Kevin for years, and I am very glad he is joining us.
In this role, Kevin will lead all aspects of our SMB business, including our go-to-market strategy, product management, marketing, sales and support. Kevin joins us with a long background in security as well as great experience working with the channel having spent many years in senior roles at Symantec. He brings a track record building SMB operations and leading global teams.
3 million Android phones vulnerable due to pre-installed rootkit
Security researchers at BitSight (AnubisNetworks) have found a backdoor that affects 3 million budget Android devices. The backdoor makes the phones vulnerable to a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack and could allow attackers to remotely execute commands …
Your Android could be sending messages to China
A pre-installed backdoor on more than 700 Android devices was discovered by Kryptowire. The backdoor allows a Chinese company called Adups to transmit information like text messages, contact lists, and IMEI numbers without users’ knowledge or consent – every 72 hours.
Tips to stay safe while shopping online this holiday season
A new era for politics and information security
Tuesday’s election defied virtually all expert opinion confidently put forth on traditional media channels. As many pundits have since accurately, albeit belatedly, noted, the outcome was a complete rejection of the country’s political establishment. More than that, it was a repudiation of the centralized, elite-driven information network that wrongly believed it still held a monopoly on public opinion. The result of this year’s presidential election is a stark indicator that the dominance of newspapers and cable television has passed, and that the new barometer of the public mood is social media—which Donald Trump understood better than any of the analysts and commentators who predicted his defeat.
Investigation of regular high load on unused machines every 7 hours
We recently decided to make our DNS infrastructure inside each of our core data centers more robust and therefore installed three virtual servers on three different hypervisors to function as DC-local recursive DNS servers. We chose an unbound DNS recu…
Five ways to speed up your slow PC
When you turn on your computer in the morning, do you have enough time to brew a cup of coffee while it starts up? Is your PC so tired that you can take a walk around the block waiting for a program to open? If your machine seems like it’s on life support, there are a few things you can do to help put some pep back in its processors.