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 […]
Yes, yes I know: Valentine’s Day comes only once a year and the teens are eagerly looking forward to it. Given the rising popularity of celebrating this day over the years, the bar for this International Day of Love has been raised rather high. Youngsters are looking forward to a day of cards, chocolates, gifts Read more…
Recently we encountered a very suspicious piece of code on some Joomla-powered webpages. The code looks as if garbled and without any special meaning, and starts like this: Upon closer observation, several strange things are to be noted. First, there are no alphanumerical symbols to be seen in any part of the code. Second, on […]
This Valentine’s Day, Don’t Just Think About “Lip lock” But Give “Data Lock” A Thought Too Love is in the air, for Valentine’s Day is near… And why just Valentine’s Day? There are a series of “Days” devoted to lovers, viz. Rose day, Propose Day and Chocolate Day!! So how have Indians responded to this Read more…