Category Archives: Consumer Alerts

Why antivirus alone won’t protect you: The anatomy of REAL security software

When computers were still relatively new, antivirus software defended against the only existing threat at the time – viruses. Today, users must protect themselves and their devices from viruses and from malware such as ransomware, as well as malicious activities carried out by cyber crooks, including Wi-Fi snooping to steal personal information, account breaching, and infecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices to perform DDoS attacks. You may be wondering, then, how to protect yourself from so many – and such diverse – threats.

Targeting SMBs’ threat tolerance concerns

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While small and medium businesses don’t appear to be as concerned about their cybersecurity vulnerabilities as they should be – i.e. SMBs are the principal targets of cybercrime and as many as 60 percent of hacked SMBs go out of business after six months – the reality is that the growing and rapidly changing threatscape and limited resources are driving them to outside help to protect their businesses. That protection can include assessments, remote monitoring and management, and backup and disaster recovery, but one way to stand out from the competition is to focus on their risk tolerances and customize your offerings to their individual risk appetites.

Prevention: One-Third Of A Healthy Cybersecurity Regimen

Whether internal or external, accidental or malicious, the cybersecurity threatscape is huge and growing, but successfully protecting your information, and your business, is not as difficult as you might think. 

In the first of a three-part series, I’ll address how a framework consisting of these three pillars provides the basics for effective cybersecurity.

Avast’s HTTPS scanner receives A* rating

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Websites using HTTPS can increase privacy, as the connection between the browser and the website’s server is encrypted. This means that the browser and the web server are the only points that see your browsing activity and the data you enter. Today, anyone who owns a URL can obtain a TLS/SSL certificate, needed to encrypt the web traffic, and create a HTTPS website. This, of course, includes cybercriminals. Because of this, back in 2014, Avast introduced a way to scan HTTPS URLs for malicious activity in order to protect our users from being infected via malware transmitted over HTTPS sites.

 

The core security components of Avast 2017

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Technology has become an integral part of our lives – at work, at school, and at home – even on our bodies. Without security, we wouldn’t be nearly as productive or enjoy the benefits it brings to our lives. The range of devices and the numerous attack vectors the bad guys have at their disposal calls for technologically advanced cybersecurity. The days of simple antivirus scans are gone. Modern systems of threat detection include core processes such as structural analysis, behavioral scanning, and cloud-based intelligence.