Add Apple to the list of high-profile companies hit by hackers as of late, right on the heels of a similar attack on Facebook just last week. According to Reuters, this is the widest known cyber attack to ever target corporate Apple computers. In other words: This is a big deal. For both Facebook and Read more…
This October, the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) will be issuing a major update to the PCI Data Security Standards (PCI DSS), which are required for accepting all electronic payments. The new additions will be discussed and presented at community meetings throughout the year, but in the meantime, it is crucial for Read more…
Once you own a smartphone or tablet, you are not likely to give it up. But it is essential that you can understand where the risks are and steer around them as you enjoy your mobile digital life. With the growth in mobile exploding, it is only natural for cybercriminals to move towards that device Read more…
Isn’t Christmas and the school holidays a whirlwind? Between holiday ‘catch-ups’, the very intense family schedule and New Year’s celebrations, it can be a wonderful yet often exhausting time. Sometime it is hard to find a moment to think! But now school has begun and the dust has settled. Phew! So, I have to ask Read more…
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin Personal privacy: It’s a tenant of American citizenship, but also the source of a long-held debate over the balance between an individual liberty and national security. Where should governments draw the line, and what Read more…
Recently we experimented with our generic unpacking heuristics. Our goal was to unpack a potentially malicious binary and dump the executable from memory to a file. During our experiments we saw a few unknown packers from which we successfully unpacked the binary; with these, however, we dumped the memory but we missed some code in Read more…
They say size doesn’t matter… however, at Twitter it actually does! How can you express yourself, knowing that you MUST use no more than 140 characters? How can you tell everything about Avast and still fit within this number? How can you respond to Avast users knowing this limitation? Well, by setting up and communicating daily via […]
“I bought a Mac, because it’s safer than a PC.” “I always surf the web with my iPhone, because I know it can’t get infected.” “I got a virus on my first PC, so now I only use Apple products.” Sound familiar? Too often, the rhetoric around the Mac vs. PC debate focuses on Apple’s Read more…
Recently we have seen a spike in a Visual Basic 6-compiled AutoRun worm family. The family is both client- and server-side polymorphic. (For more on this family, refer to our VIL and Advisory entries.) The W32/Autorun.worm.aaeh family usually gets on a victim’s machine through email spam, Blacole drive-by downloads, or downloads by BackDoor-FJW. From a behavioral Read more…
People love lists. Lately, I’ve seen lists for 7 Ways to Look Younger, Worst Dressed at the Grammys, and our favorite, Top 5 Facebook Software Pages. Late last year, as the number of fans on our popular Facebook page increased, Julia, my fellow Queen of the avast! FREEks, and I noticed that we were quickly […]