How to Protect Your Computer from Hackers, Spyware and Viruses

How can I protect my Windows PC against malware? | Technology I have just ordered a Windows PC based on your recommendation, and now ask for your advice on anti-spyware and virus protection software for it. Any help you could offer me would be greatly appreciated. Mary Mass-market malware is a numbers game, played mostly with familiar off-the-shelf exploit kits (EKs). I ran into one yesterday when the Labour party press team unintentionally ("we were hacked") tweeted a link to an owl video that wanted me to install a "Flash update" that contained viruses. Just doing the right things is usually enough to keep more than 98% of Windows PCs malware free, barring accidents. Keep up to date The vast majority of malware infections exploit security holes that have already been fixed, so the most important part of PC hygiene is to keep all your software up to date. Some other programs – including the Firefox and Google Chrome browsers – will also install patches automatically. Further, I strongly recommend installing Secunia's Personal Software Inspector.

How to Tell if your Cell Phone is Being Tracked, Tapped or Monitored by Spy Software - SpyzRus.net There are a few signs that may help you find out if your cell phone has spy software installed and that it is being tracked, tapped or monitored in some way. Quite often these signs can be quite subtle but when you know what to look out for, you can sometimes find out if your cell phone is being spied on. This article series will deal with How to Find installed Spy Phone Software and then How to Remove Spy Software followed by How to Secure your Cell Phone. This guide should help for all types of Smartphone including Android and for the iPhone there are a few extra tips. It seems that almost everyone is obsessed with cell phones, from young kids’ right through to the elderly. I know that it might seem strange to younger readers, but back in the day, cell phones were only used to make phone calls (often quite unreliably). Is Your Mobile Phone Being Monitored? spy software apps. Detecting Cell Phone Spy Software Odd Phone Behavior – look for any changes in your cell phones behavior.

The Five Biggest Threats to Your Kids’ Privacy, and What You Can Do About Them Remember back in school, when your teachers warned that everything you did would go on your permanent record? It turns out your teachers have become right. That permanent record is the Internet. It’s hard to be a fully functioning adult in 2014 and not leave behind a digital trail. Now imagine how hard it is for your kids, who have never known a world where the net did not exist. From the moment they emerge from the womb, they’re generating data, which is then eagerly absorbed and stored by Internet companies, government agencies and some evil no-goodniks. Despite federal laws prohibiting the collection of data from children under the age of 13, dossiers are constantly being created about your kids, whether it’s Google capturing their search histories, advertisers creating profiles of their interests, or their grandparents tagging photos of them on Facebook. Canadian Singles Find New Ways To Meet UrthBox Healthy Snack Boxes. Math Practice - Ages 5-15 Questions, complaints, kudos?

Bank Hackers Steal Millions via Malware Photo PALO ALTO, Calif. — In late 2013, an A.T.M. in Kiev started dispensing cash at seemingly random times of day. No one had put in a card or touched a button. Cameras showed that the piles of money had been swept up by customers who appeared lucky to be there at the right moment. But when a Russian cybersecurity firm, Kaspersky Lab, was called to Ukraine to investigate, it discovered that the errant machine was the least of the bank’s problems. The bank’s internal computers, used by employees who process daily transfers and conduct bookkeeping, had been penetrated by malware that allowed cybercriminals to record their every move. Then the group impersonated bank officers, not only turning on various cash machines, but also transferring millions of dollars from banks in , , Switzerland, the United States and the Netherlands into dummy accounts set up in other countries. Continue reading the main story Transferring money into hackers’ fraudulent bank accounts fraudulent accounts overseas Mr.

Which nation-state is behind the sophisticated, stealthy Regin malware? | ZDNet Symantec Security Response has discovered a new malware called Regin which, they say, "...displays a degree of technical competence rarely seen and has been used in spying operations against governments, infrastructure operators, businesses, researchers, and private individuals." This back-door trojan has been in use, according to the security company, since at least 2008, and has stayed under the radar since. The level of quality and the amount of effort put into keeping it secret convinces Symantec that it is a primary cyberespionage tool of a nation state. Regin is a multi-stage attack, each stage but the first encrypted and none by themselves especially revealing about the overall attack. The picture only emerges when you have all five stages. Attacks were committed between 2008 and 2011 (Regin 1.0), at which point the malware disappeared. Even so, there is still much about Regin that they do not understand.

You Might Want To Take Another Pass At Your Passwords : All Tech Considered They might be hard to remember sometimes, but good passwords may be the best defense against hackers. iStockphoto hide caption itoggle caption iStockphoto They might be hard to remember sometimes, but good passwords may be the best defense against hackers. iStockphoto Compromises of private corporate or consumer data are all too common. Yet even President Obama last week poked fun at our common line of defense: the lazy password. "It's just too easy for hackers to figure out usernames and passwords like 'password' or '123457.' In short, passwords have, in some cases, undermined their own security intent. You'd think a librarian might have a good system for keeping track of all her passwords. Many passwords require a combination of numbers, upper and lower case letters or special characters. "I used to keep it on a little sheet of paper behind my ID badge that I wore around at work, but it just has gotten so big," she says. Sammons says she saves her passwords in an email to herself.

Mobile Malware: Small Numbers, but Growing THE warning was dire: A small security company revealed a flaw in millions of smartphones that could allow dangerous software to masquerade as a legitimate app and seize control of a phone. The threat was a big conversation topic at this year’s Black Hat security conference. But after that, we didn’t hear much more about it. Perhaps that should not be surprising. A recent report by the security company McAfee said that there was a 197 percent increase in mobile malware from 2012 to 2013. The actual number of phones hit by mobile malware, however, is tiny. Photo By comparison, the recent hack of Home Depot’s computer network affected 56 million cardholders. So is mobile malware a threat? But if you’re not a celebrity or a protester, and you’re not carrying corporate or government secrets on your device, it is certainly not your biggest computer security problem. Phones can get infected when someone accidentally downloads a malicious app. “On the scale of PC threats, that is lower,” Mr.

How Do I Protect Myself Against Malware? | Surveillance Self-Defense The best way to deal with a malware attack is to avoid getting infected in the first place. This can be a difficult feat if your adversary has access to zero day attacks—attacks that exploit a previously-unknown vulnerability in a computer application. Think of your computer as a fortress; a zero day would be a hidden secret entrance that you do not know about, but which an attacker has discovered. There are many ways in which an attacker might try to trick you into installing malware on your computer. For example, in Syria, pro-Assad hackers targeted members of the opposition with malware hidden in fake revolutionary documents and a fake anti-hacking tool. The best way to avoid being infected with this kind of targeted malware is to avoid opening the documents and installing the malware in the first place.

In their words: Experts weigh in on Mac vs. PC security CNET asks a host of security experts which of the major operating-system platforms is more secure for consumers. Here's what they have to say. When I am asked the question "Which is more secure, Mac or PC?" So I decided to conduct an informal survey of a bunch of security experts and see what they had to say in the hopes that people can use the information to help them come to their own conclusions. Before I provide quotes from the 32 experts who participated in the survey, along with edited comments from an interview with a Microsoft representative and a link that Apple provided, I'd like to share some relevant research from antivirus vendor ESET. ESET released the results of a survey in November related to awareness of cybercrime in the U.S. Meanwhile, Mac users are just as vulnerable to Web-based attacks like phishing as PC users are, and Mac users who fall prey to phishing tend to lose more money on average than PC users do, the survey found. Robert G. R.

Hygiene, Honey Pots, Espionage: 3 Approaches To Defying Hackers : All Tech Considered Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cybersecurity startup CrowdStrike, says his company is building stockpiles of intelligence about potential hacking groups. Keith Bedford/Reuters/Landov hide caption itoggle caption Keith Bedford/Reuters/Landov Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cybersecurity startup CrowdStrike, says his company is building stockpiles of intelligence about potential hacking groups. Keith Bedford/Reuters/Landov We're still waiting for details on how the hack against the health care company Anthem occurred. But there's a classic approach behind many of the cyberattacks that make the news: An employee in the company gets an email with an attachment ... opens it ... malicious software in the message injects itself into the corporate network ... and bam! Across the cybersecurity industry, startups are trying to figure out how to solve this problem — and they're developing some very different approaches. Take 1: Virtual Machines First, the company Bromium. Take 2: Honeypots

Mac OS X Snow Leopard and malware detection - Apple Support "Malware" is an abbreviated term for malicious software. Malware includes viruses, worms, trojan horses, and other types of software that can damage the software on your system or violate your privacy. Malware can be installed on your computer when you download content or applications from the Internet, via email, text messaging, or websites. Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard checks for known malware and alerts you so that you do not accidentally install it on your system. Files downloaded via applications such as Safari, iChat, and Mail are checked for safety at the time that they are opened. Apple maintains a list of known malicious software that is used during the safe download check to determine if a file contains malicious software. If you do not wish to receive these updates, you can disable daily update by unchecking "Automatically update safe downloads list" in the Security pane, in System Preferences.

Web-Borne Malware Breaches Cost $3.2M to Remediate: Survey A new survey from the Ponemon Institute calls web-borne malware not only a growing threat to enterprise data security, but a costly one. According to the report, which surveyed 645 IT pros and IT security practitioners and was sponsored by security firm Spike Security, web-borne malware attacks cost the organizations in the survey an average of $3.2 million to remediate. The organizations surveyed had an average of 14,000 employees. Sixty-nine percent believe browser-borne malware is a more significant threat today than it was 12 months ago. "The findings of this research reveal that current solutions are not stopping the growth of web-borne malware," said Dr. While all of the companies surveyed utilized a multilayered, defense-in-depth approach, they still dealt with an average of 51 security breaches during the past year tied to the failure of malware detection technology. Brian Prince is a Contributing Writer for SecurityWeek. Previous Columns by Brian Prince: