Personal Financial Information May Be At Risk, Linked Site Says

DENVER -- The online edition of the Rocky Mountain News post a virus warning Friday for people who visited RockyMountainNews.com last week.

The warning, carried on the main page of the site, said:

"If you visited RockyMountainNews.com between Saturday and Tuesday on a Windows computer without virus protection or have not updated your virus protection in the past two weeks, your computer might be infected with a virus."

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 17:02

A recent security advisory from a messaging security company warned that service providers are placing e-mail users at risk by continuing to ignore sophisticated virus propagation techniques. Attackers are moving beyond traditional tactics, such as sending messages with virus executables attached or virus-infected documents, to employing hybrid attacks that combine elements of both spam and viruses. In these attacks, malware authors embed links in informative or advertising e-mails. Recipients are enticed to follow these links to a Website that hosts the malware, which could be a virus, worm or Trojan.

These advanced threats embed anti-spam and anti-virus (AV) evasion techniques with the objective of eluding both spam and traditional AV filters. Most spam filters are not capable of catching these highly mutable threats because they do not follow the recurrent, mass e-mail tactics commonly found in spam. Likewise, conventional AV solutions bypass these messages as they appear to be spam or phishing. As these attacks become the norm, operators are urged to re-examine their anti-virus strategies and ensure that their messaging security processes are capable of detecting these hybrid threats.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 10:12

Click. Just like that, our world can change --
often for the worse. Be it a slip of the finger or an accidental move of a
mouse, almost everyone has experienced that dreaded feeling of deleting
something that we should not have. Perhaps even more astonishing, however,
is the fact that such things need never happen. There is a whole class of
data protection software out there
which will undelete many of our most painful mistakes. The big question
then, is why doesn't everyone have such software on their systems?

It is generally acknowledged that there are several classes of software
that you should never be without if you own a computer. Anti-virus software
is an obvious choice. Anti-spyware software is now becoming just as
important.

Certainly, data protection software
has been around for a long time now, but a casual survey of almost any
group of computer users will show that virtually no one has such software
installed on their systems. And, this is even the case with big networks,
where the value of a lost document could mean serious dollars lost.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 16:11

Laptops are an easy target, both from thieves operating nearby and others on the Internet. Portable cable locks can protect you from computer theft, and software tracking devices can be purchased that broadcast their presence on the Internet the first time a stolen computer goes online.

Any computer you buy today should include virus protection and, for younger users, parental controls. Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard include parental controls for limiting the time, specific Internet access and activities on computers. It's also smart to place the family home computer in a public area where parents can oversee a child's digital activity.

Virus protection is a must. Bruce Cowper, Microsoft Canada Chief Security Advisor, warns that today's massive social networking activity -- there are 700,000 Facebook users in Calgary and more than two million in Toronto -- brings certain risks.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 10:15