Author Archives: Avast Blog

avast! BeFree photo contest winners

We are pleased to announce the winners of the avast! Be Free photo contest. Entrants were asked to submit an original photo interpreting what the Avast slogan “Be Free” means to them. We received everything from brave adventurers jumping out of planes to friends enjoying a day at the carnival to smiling dogs. The winners […]

For Your Satisfaction – Android:Satfi-A [Trj]

We all have our favorite apps for all the things we do. I use Shazam when I don’t know what song is playing, Maps when I’m lost, FlightRadar24 when I’m curious about the plane flying over my head. These apps are there for my satisfaction; they meet some need. Each of us have different needs […]

New High School and College Grads – Read This!

Social media profiles affects college admission, job searches, and careers A 24-year-old high school teacher in Georgia, USA, lost her job after an anonymous e-mailer complained about a Facebook picture of her sipping wine and drinking beer while on vacation in Europe. An Arizona woman was fired after ranting on Facebook when she was passed […]

Facebook profiles are cloned

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A low-tech type of identity theft is threatening Facebook users in South Africa. Facebook “cloning” has been around for years, but has had a revival this past week. We learned about it in a personal way – the brother of an Avast colleague, Richard B. from South Africa, had his profile cloned and notified Richard. […]

Analysis of a self-debugging Sirefef cryptor

Recently I wrote a blog post about a legitimate website spreading Sirefef malware. Then I continued with a deeper analysis and noticed that it uses an interesting cryptor. Malware authors spread many new variants of malware every day. These variants often look completely different at the first glance. That’s why regular updates of your antivirus […]

5 question with Marcus Taveira, our Brazilian support specialist.

We are excited to share news with you. Our social media team has added additional, professional support.  Marcus Taveira, our Latino sunshine, joins Peter Bucek to help our community by responding to technical and customer care enquiries on Facebook and Twitter. Marcus responds in Portuguese and English. We are pleased to welcome Marcus to our […]

avast! Be Free photo entries

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The avast! Be Free photo contest has been active for over a week now, and we have received thousands of photos. We asked you to interpret what our slogan Be Free means to you. Here are some of the photos that we think does a good job. Look through the gallery and vote for your […]

How do I protect my online accounts from being hacked?

Question of the week:  First it was Facebook, then Living Social, then LinkedIn, now Twitter accounts have been hacked. How can I keep my business and personal accounts from being hacked, if the big boys can’t even protect theirs? You are right. It seems like every week we hear about another major website or an […]

Grum lives!

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  Grum, one of the largest spamming botnets, suspected to be responsible for over 17% of worldwide spam (as described here), which was “killed” in July 2012, still lives.  We have been tracking its activity since January 2013.  We can confirm spiderlab’s doubts about the grum killing published in March 2013. The following article provides some […]