Category Archives: Consumer Alerts

Consumers can lead the way in pressuring tech companies to respect security and democracy | Avast

The example on everyone’s minds is, of course, Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, now further confirmed by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The Kremlin’s use of social media to stoke existing partisan tensions in the U.S., achieved through a sophisticated multi-million-dollar operation, resulted in the indictment in February of thirteen Russian nationals and three companies.

Speeding Up and Cleaning Your Mac | Avast Essential Guide

Unfortunately, Macs might be the sports cars of the IT business, but just like any car, they need proper maintenance to keep running. In this guide we’ll walk you through the essentials — and even some great secrets — to clean up invisible clutter and tune up your MacBook, iMac, or Mac Pro beyond its limits.  

Five endpoint threats affecting small businesses | Avast Business

Endpoints are an easy target for hackers, so it’s essential that small businesses protect themselves. Connected employees, vulnerable software and weak antivirus all contribute to this being a favorite target of hackers. And, as the list below details, there are many types of cyberattacks that target endpoints, from phishing to malvertising.

New Monero mining malware discovered in Google Play

In November 2017, we detected a strain of malware known as JSMiner in Google Play. The Monero cryptomining capabilities were discovered inside the gaming application Cooee. At the time of discovery, we forecasted a rise in mobile mining malware as atta…

Greedy cybercriminals host malware on GitHub

Cybercriminals are aggressively uploading cryptocurrency mining malware to GitHub. The cybercriminals fork other projects, which on Github means producing a copy of someone else’s project, to build upon the project or to use as a starting point and subsequently push a new commit with the malware to the project. The projects which have been forked appear to be chosen at random. A list of affected GitHub repositories can be found at the bottom of this blog post.

Managing SMB endpoint protection without an IT department | Avast Business

For small business owners, cash flow and sales are top of the agenda, leaving little time to focus on cybersecurity. Many small businesses will never reach a size at which they need or can afford a devoted IT support person, let alone a whole department. Of course, this doesn’t mean small businesses don’t need to protect themselves from cyberattacks. Thankfully, there are easy ways that SMB owners can manage their cybersecurity, protect their devices and prevent data breaches without an IT department.

Time to Tighten Up Device Security | Avast

Lawmakers urge better security for smart devices

The first indication that internet of things (IoT) devices posed a real security threat came in October 2016 when a botnet — made up of devices such as security cameras infected with Mirai malware — attacked Dyn, a provider of DNS services.The attack came in the form of a DDoS (distributed denial of service) assault on Dyn’s servers. By firing off multiple requests every second, the attack took down websites all over the USA and Europe, as DNS servers were overrun with requests from millions of infected devices.