Category Archives: Consumer Alerts

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. […]

5 Mobile Security Tips

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Cybercrime is one of the most lucrative illegal businesses of our time, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Over the last decade, cybercriminals have developed new and increasingly sophisticated ways of capitalizing on the explo­sion of Internet users, and they face little danger of being caught. Meanwhile, consumers are con­fronted with greater risks Read more…

A Cyber Bank for Cybercriminals Meets Its Demise

This week the Federal Government scored a major victory over a massive worldwide network of cybercriminals by shutting down Liberty Reserve, a criminal business venture disguised as a bank that was fronting a secret money system for everyone from credit card and identity thieves to Ponzi scheme peddlers, hackers for hire, and money launderers. Liberty Read more…

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 […]

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. […]