Category Archives: Consumer Alerts

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 […]

Consumer Reports recommends free security software in 2013 State of the Net Report

More than 58 million American adults had at least one malware infection that affected their home PC’s performance last year. The cost of repairing the damage from those infections was nearly $4 billion. These findings are from the latest Consumer Reports’ Annual State of the Net Report published in the June issue of their respected magazine. […]

Phishing Scam Targets Walmart.com Online Customers

Late last week, Walmart alerted the public to an email-based scam that used the company’s name (misspelled as “Wallmart”) to illegally gather information about users. The email sported the title “Thanks for your Walmart.com order,” and after confused users clicked on links within the emails, their Walmart accounts were charged. While local police departments and Read more…

Weak Passwords Can Cost You Everything

If your computer or mobile was hacked or your passwords were cracked and your data was lost or if all the websites you have an account with were hacked and all that information was the hands of a criminal, how devastated will you be? In McAfee’s study on the value of digital assets, consumers estimated Read more…

Lockscreen Win32:Lyposit displayed as a fake MacOs app

When the mastermind hackers of the notorious Carberp Banking Trojan were arrested, we thought the story had ended. But a sample that we received on May 7th, a  month after the arrests, looked very suspicious. It connected to a well known URL pattern and it really was the Carberp Trojan. Moreover, the domain it connected […]

Riddle: What’s the One Password You’ll NEVER Forget?

Last week during his keynote speech at the Interop IT conference, PayPal’s Chief Information Security Officer Michael Barrett pointed to a slide depicting a tombstone for passwords with the dates 1961-2013. According to Barrett, while passwords are still required for so many applications and services, they have simply outlived their usefulness. Barrett predicted that we Read more…

avast! in the Final Frontier

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With the release of the summer blockbuster Star Trek: Into Darkness, I started thinking about the Star Trek universe, Trek-nology, and what it would be like if avast! Antivirus was adopted by Starfleet. Wouldn’t it be amusing to hear the voice of the computer echoing through the bridge, “avast! Virus Database has been updated”? As […]

Four Easy Ways to Protect your Mobile Privacy

Identifying criminals these days is usually not as easy as spotting them based on their appearance or behavior. Unfortunately, there isn’t any particular dress code for a thief, particularly the cyber kind. Cybercriminals can be your neighbor next door or in a completely different country, with the full ability to get into your digital life. Read more…