Category Archives: Consumer Alerts

Zuckerberg Twitter hack could have been avoided with better passwords

Avoid having your online accounts hacked like Mark Zuckerberg’s by managing your passwords correctly.

The recent news of celebrity social media accounts, including Mark Zuckerberg’s, being hacked should be seen as an important reminder to how valuable passwords are. Who knows if the cybercriminals that hacked the accounts just tweeted strange things or if they went a step further and read the celebrities’ direct messages or more. 

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Most people create easy passwords like these and never change them

Out of storage? Photo Space creates space on your iPhone

New Photo Space app fits 7GB worth of photos into 1GB of space

How many times have you seen a message like this?
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If you are like the thousands of iPhone users around the world, then you see that message all too frequently. Of course, it always pops up just as you want to take a picture. 😬

People told us that to get more space they resort to uninstalling apps and deleting photos. A few get storage from iCloud, but they complain that they have no control and it gets expensive to pay for more space.

None of those are very good solutions. So we came up with something better.

Avast Photo Space

Photo Space is a free app that takes your high-quality photos and optimizes them to reduce the amount of storage they occupy. That means that you get 7 times more space for your photos and apps. 

The newest phishing spam: “Security Alert!!!”

Guess who hackers disguised themselves as in a recent phishing campaign? That’s right Avast! A laughable fake Avast alert email is trying to harvest webmail addresses, being sent out via a spam message and leading to several domains where attackers have prepared a simple form to collect victims’ email addresses and passwords.

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Received spam in a phishing scheme impersonating Avast

Avast Cleanup is ready for beta testing

Become one of our Avast Cleanup beta testers!

Calling all beta testers!

We’ve got great news for you: Avast Cleanup, our PC-cleaning software, has undergone some big, exciting changes. The latest Avast Cleanup sports a brand-new design, includes exciting new features, and best of all, is now standalone – this means you can use it even without downloading Avast Antivirus products first.

We’ve now released the public beta version of Avast Cleanup and would love to receive your thoughts, opinions and insights on the program to help make it the very best it can be.

How to get traffic to a fake app on the Google Play Store

Fake Android apps on the Google Play Store use shortcuts to get popular

It doesn’t happen too often thanks to the rigorous checks apps go through, but occassionally a fake app will slip onto the Google Play Store. How does it happen? 

Here’s what cheating developers do:

When an Android app developer creates a malicious app and wants it to get attention fast, the easiest way to do it is to make it look like some other app that is already popular, like Waze. The impatient developer names it “Waze Tips” so it looks like customers will learn something useful. Then he puts it onto the Google Play Store and creates fake comments and ratings so it looks legit. After that, he’s set for success.

That’s the logic behind fake Android apps. Not surprisingly, there actually is an app that uses all these methods called “Free Waze Traffic GPS Maps Tip”.

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This fake app uses all the tricks to fool users into installing

 

Avoiding UEFA Euro 2016 and Copa America Centenario scams

Two of the biggest soccer, or as the rest of the world calls the sport, football, events –Copa America Centenario and the UEFA Euro Cup have fans across the Americas and Europe hyped. Fans are trying to get as close to the games as possible, either by getting tickets to attend a match or by playing soccer/football themed games. Cybercrooks are also big fans of major events like these andthey, unfortunately, like to take advantage of fans’ enthusiasm.

Beware of online scams

It’s only natural for die-hard fans to get excited when they see tickets on sale for either sold out games or for a cheaper price than the tickets sold on the official Copa America and UEFA sites. Cybercriminals are fully aware of how desired tickets to Copa America and the Euro Cup are and have set up phishing sites and phishing social media and email campaigns to trick people into buying phony tickets.

Numbers from the British Local Government Association published in May show bogus tickets from sold out matches and other summer events have been appearing on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

UEFA, in March, already warned fans of counterfeit tickets and travel packages being sold online and warned fans to refrain from buying tickets from unauthorized sellers.

Adware on Google Play: Knock-off FIFA apps take advantage of football (soccer) hype around Copa America and Euro Cup

Copa America Centenario and Euro Cup are starting this Friday and next Friday, respectively, and everyone across the Americas and Europe are in the football/soccer spirit.

I found four soccer/football apps on the Google Play Store, all with the same or similar names, that are pretty bad knock-offs of the popular FIFA app. All four apps have negative reviews claiming the apps do practically nothing but display ads. Clearly, the person or people behind these apps only intention is to make money and not to deliver quality apps.

I dug a little deeper and despite the fact that these four apps were uploaded under different developer names, they seem to be developed by one developer. All four apps have the same dex files and manifests. Each developer name has only uploaded one app and there are no links to any developer homepages.

Ad heavy soccer apps on Google Play

I decided to test each app to see if the negative reviews regarding the ads were true and unfortunately, they are…

On Children’s Day, teach your kids how to stay safe online

Happy International Children's Day from Avast!

Happy International Children’s Day! Celebrate this year’s holiday by keeping your kids safe in the digital world. As the trusted authority in your home, you are the go-to resource to help keep the Internet a safe place for your family.

To protect your children from inappropriate online behavior, people with bad intentions and unsuitable content, you need to stay informed about current issues and understand the social networks and devices that your children use. Avast Free Antivirus and Avast Mobile Security can help you stay safe while using each of your devices.

Children whose parents talk to them regularly about what they do online will likely use responsible behavior when on their own.