Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Free Cloud AntiVirus Security Startup Immunet Reaches 500,000 Members

PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Immunet, the developer of next-generation security and Cloud AntiVirus technologies, today announced it has reached over 500,000 users of its free AntiVirus product, Immunet Protect. Immunet Protect 2.0 launched in June 2010 and received a 4.5 star rating from CNET. Immunet provides real-time protection from over 14 million threats through the Immunet Cloud. The product is extremely lightweight (up to 35 times smaller than competing products), fast, and compatible with other market leading security software.


"We've grown extraordinarily fast since we launched our beta product in August of 2009. We owe our success to our members who recommend and share Immunet with their most trusted contacts, friends, and family," says Oliver Friedrichs, Immunet Founder and CEO, "We've focused on changing the AntiVirus experience from one that cripples your PC to one that is streamlined and seamless. In addition, the approaches used by traditional products protect you from less than 50% of new threats; Immunet Protect fills that gap. Our rapid growth demonstrates that performance and efficacy continue to be a real pain point for Consumers as they seek out new solutions."



Each time a user downloads the free Cloud AntiVirus software from immunet.com, they can protect their friends and contacts by inviting them into their community. Each new member in the community enhances the strength of Immunet's Collective Immunity(TM) technology. This technology offers members a network protection effect that keeps their personal PCs and the computers of their friends and family safe online. Each time a virus is blocked on one computer in the Immunet Community, all other PCs are instantly protected from the same virus. This collaborative approach leverages 'strength-in-numbers' to grow stronger with each new community member.


"I'm extremely excited to see our software used by over half a million people to protect their PCs. We're now protecting members in over 192 countries, including the Vatican City!" says Cofounder and VP of Engineering Alfred Huger. "We welcome the next 500,000 members with open arms."


Immunet Protect Free 2.0 is available as a free AntiVirus download from the Immunet website, www.immunet.com. Users can upgrade to Immunet Protect Plus for advanced, offline protection at anytime, while Immunet Protect Free will always remain free.


About Immunet


Immunet was founded in July 2008 by AntiVirus industry veterans to address a sweeping shift in the Internet threat landscape. Immunet utilizes the latest advances in computing, including cloud computing, collective intelligence, data mining and machine learning. Immunet Protect 2.0 is a free Cloud AntiVirus download that provides real-time protection from over 14 million threats daily.


To connect with Immunet please visit www.immunet.com, follow us on Twitter @immunet or visit the Immunet Facebook Fan Page.


Collective Immunity(TM) is a registered trademark of Immunet Corporation.

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Fake antivirus software using ransom threats

Fake antivirus programs appear to be adopting some of the money-raising tactics of more threatening ransom malware, security company Fortinet's latest threat report has found.

The most prevalent malware variant during August was TotalSecurity W32/FakeAlert.LU!tr, a malicious program that masquerades as antivirus software in order to sell worthless licenses for non-existent malware. On its own it accounted for 37.3 per cent of all malware threats detected by the company during the month.

Unlike standard fake antivirus programs, however, the new version of TotalSecurity takes the ruse a stage further by preventing any applications other than a web browser to run, claiming they are 'infected'. The user is invited to have the infection cleaned by buying the bogus TotalSecurity product.

Adding an extra layer of sophistication to its arsenal - and no doubt aware how quickly bogus antivirus software is blocked by genuine security products - TotalSecurity can now vary the downloads it feeds to target PC using server-side polymorphism. Put another way, the exact version downloaded to a victim's PC will constantly change which makes detection harder.

"This is a technique typically seen with botnets, such as Waledac, and has been picked up by the developers of TotalSecurity. This is another example of how relying purely on antivirus is not a silver-bullet approach to protecting systems from infection," said Fortinet's threat research head, Derek Manky.

According to Fortinet, such attacks demonstrate the vulnerability of PC-based antivirus software. A layered defence would have a better chance of detecting TotalSecurity by either intercepting the initial spam used to spread it or by blocking the download website.

Once rare enough to be a curiosity, malware using threats and direct interference with a PC's operation have slowly become more common.

A previous report from Fortinet in March noted a sudden surge in the technique, about a year after the first aggressive use of ransomware in the form of the notorious Vundo Trojan. That particular piece of malware used crude encryption of a victim's files.

In July came news of the odd Krotten Trojan that disables a victim's PC in a variety of ways before asking for a tiny payment to be made to a Ukrainian mobile phone network. Two months before that researchers in Japan discovered the Kenzero porn blackmail Trojan that threatens to post a victim's embarrassing browsing history to a public website.


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Antivirus isn't dead--it's growing up

We've been hearing it for years: antivirus software is dead. But is it really? If so, it seems to have more lives than Richard Nixon.

Rather than being the industry's swan song, mobile devices could be its redemption opportunity.
The antivirus industry is in major transition as threats have evolved from being just the viruses and worms written to exploit holes in Windows that plagued computers in the 1990s to the exploits that target vulnerabilities in Web applications and end user gullibility today.

Many consumers fork over at least $40 for Norton AntiVirus or something similar, many more are turning to free antivirus from AVG or Avast (here's why), and yet millions of computers are still getting hit with infections daily.

While no antivirus software is perfect, the perception that AV often isn't doing a good enough job is backed by studies. Recent benchmark tests pegged the average detection rate among major antivirus products at about 75 percent. (In one test, three out of 10 products stopped all of the original exploits, but the vendors are not named. However, the tests are to be taken with a grain of salt given the variances in testing standards.)

Antispyware and antispam have become standard in most AV, or antimalware, products as vendors have expanded their software into endpoint protection suites. And many have begun placing as much emphasis on heuristic technologies that look at the behavior or reputation of a piece of software as well as matching it to a database of malware signatures. But malware writers are adept at testing their code against the antivirus software and tweaking it until it passes through undetected.

As an alternative, some people are turning to whitelisting technologies that allow only approved programs to run on a computer. Whitelisting is akin to the closed environment of the iPhone where Apple vets every app and is largely effective in protecting the devices, said Gartner analyst John Pescatore. (Bruce Schneier discusses the problems with whitelisting in his essay from last year on the state of the antivirus industry.)

"Antivirus in the e-mail server does a lot of good things...(but) antivirus on people's desktops is almost totally ineffective," Pescatore said. "The antiviral model has been broken for quite a while."

With the fast rise of smartphones and new electronics like iPads, the big challenge for antivirus companies is how best to protect those devices.

It's obvious the traditional antivirus software model won't work, in large part because handheld devices have limited processing power, memory and storage, said Rebecca Bace, chief executive of Infidel, a security consultancy. That's where the cloud comes in, she said.

"There is market demand from the consumer that this will be rolled in as part of the service," Bace said. "This is part of the utilization of network access; something you expect a provider to offer. When I sign up with Verizon, to a degree I'll have the expectation that they'll handle all the security stuff."

Pescatore has a similar view of the future of mobile security.

"In the smartphone world, the answer will not be putting antivirus clients on every phone," said Pescatore. "The answer will be (malware) filtering by cellular carriers...Everything that goes on the phone has to go through the carrier."

Clearly, the antivirus space is grappling with how to move to mobile, said Hugh Thompson, who serves as chair of the RSA Conference and is founder of consultancy People Security and an adjunct professor of software security at Columbia University.

"The challenge for antivirus is how to adapt to new devices, how to allow users to make better choices around what they're doing, and from a business perspective it's coming down to the cloud--what does antivirus mean in the cloud?," he said. "Those three points will define AV over the next two to three years."

Mobile is likely a big reason behind Intel's $7.6 billion acquisition of McAfee, according to Thompson. "For Intel to buy McAfee, they can build some synergies there so that when the chip is released they will have an antivirus solution that supports the chipset and the platforms that come on it," he said.

In general, a big part of the problem for people today is the fact that they are putting so much of their lives on the Web and they don't realize that that data, albeit in numerous different Web sites and sources, can be easily used to trick them into accepting malware with open arms. Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have expanded peoples' circles of friends and acquaintances exponentially and that can be used to advantage in personalized attacks.

Antivirus will eventually have to defend against social engineering attacks as well as malware, Thompson said.

For instance, an e-mail coming from someone claiming that they met you at an event a few months back and you have a friend in common is more likely to be trusted than one with a generic reference like "LOL is this you?" with a link that appears to lead to a video.

"In the future, an antivirus product will go out and analyze the information and say this is the data that is out there on the Web, this could be a legitimate person, but it will make you aware that you are connected to this person on LinkedIn and you tweeted about a meeting five months ago," Thompson said. "That context sensitive level of threat information is going to be really important in the future."

"It's a fascinating time for AV," he said. "Rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated over the last few years."

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Wednesday, September 1, 2010

VMworld 2010: Day 1, Attendees Say “Yes, We Cloud!”

This year’s VMworld topped all expectations and attracted 17,021 attendees, an impressive number considering the state of the economy and the overall retreat in conference attendance due to budget cuts. The theme this year is, “Virtual Roads. Actual Clouds.” it’s all about how we get to the Cloud.

. While the opening keynote was heavily branded and influenced by cloud, it was very apparent that the focus and the innovation were geared towards the applications. Making applications available from anywhere, at any time using any device summarizes the opening keynote.

The keynote started by showing a humorous short movie that was attempting to describe and define Cloud Computing, it even enlisted the help of “The Oracle” from the feature trilogy “The Matrix” to try and define Cloud Computing to no avail.

Up first was VMware Chief Marketing Officer Rick Jackson to kick off the opening session by taking us down memory lane, recapping the value add and cost savings that VMware’s products delivered to organizations. Jackson also emphasized the need for open standards when dealing with virtualization and cloud computing, an extremely welcome step, but we can start with VMware View, allowing it to be hypervisor independent.

Paul Maritz then took center stage for the official keynote, “virtually speaking” Maritz declared the death of the operating system, taking a jab at Microsoft. He first reports that in 2010 the number of virtual machines deployed far surpassed the number of physical machines. He then indirectly uses this analogy to announce that virtualization, today, replaces the hardware and that the application platforms replace the operating system.

He tries to soften the blow a bit by saying that this will happen with or without VMware but the underlying message was clear; VMware wants to build the next generation applications independent of a general purpose operating system.

Maritz also emphasized the importance of automation and orchestration on private and public clouds, noting that today, for every dollar spent on CapEx, $6 to $8 is spent on OpEx, therefore, VMware is dedicated and will continue to innovate in these areas.

Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and Sr. VP of R&D was up next, he announced 2 VMware acquisitions, Integrien, a company based out of Armenia that focuses on visual, real-time performance and analytics. The second acquisition was of TriCipher, a single sign on solution for SaaS portals.

Herrod also took a big jab at Microsoft, indirectly criticizing Hyper-V’s inability to live migrate more than 1 VM at a time.

Herrod then announced the availability of vCloud Director, a highly automated, self-service, pay-as you go engine that allows enterprises and service providers alike to extend this functionality to their users. A slew of security products were also announced, notably the vShield Endpoint, an Antivirus offloading mechanism, which allows anti-virus to be offloaded from the VMs onto an appliance that front ends and scans the traffic before it gets to the VMs. vShield App and vShield Edge were also security product announcements which I will be blogging about in more details later.

vFabric was an interesting announcement; it is a cloud application framework that allows for the writing of applications that can run on private and public clouds interchangeably. Today, most cloud based applications have a lock in mechanism where it’s either a public cloud offering or a private cloud offering, this new product aims to resolve that.

The anticipated announcement of VMware View 4.5 with support for Windows 7, type-2 off-line use case, MAC support and support for vSphere 4.1 was next, followed by the release of a VMware developed View Client for the iPad, which featured a really cool demo of the new product and its use cases.

After the keynote, I had a chance to interview Herrod, and asked him about the disappearance of the Client Virtualization Platform project (CVP), VMware’s Type-1 client hypervisor; stay tuned for his answer on video! about this and other topics.

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Oman: Antivirus solution for 35,000 PCs

MUSCAT -- The Ministry of Education has implemented a new online virus detection solution for 35,000 PC terminal users in response to rapidly increasing malware volumes. The ministry has adopted the antivirus for Windows Workstation of Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, to beef up its network
security and reduce vulnerability and exposure to hackers, spam and virus.

"The detection rates of the previous vendor's solution could not keep up with the rate of infections and the Ministry of Education took the decision to identify a new solution to resolve the issue at endpoint level," said the ministry's spokesperson Ali bin Suleiman al Hinai. "We chose Kaspersky Lab because of its high detection rates of viruses and
the solution's ability to perform with the minimum resources possible. Our tests of Kaspersky Lab's product on one of
our live servers showed that it detected and removed more malware than any other solutions we tried.

"We have already seen the important benefits the new products have introduced to our operations through compatibility with existing IT security infrastructure, higher detection rates, user friendly interface and ability to maintain high performance without slowing down our systems," said Al Hinai.

The ministry has also acquired a further 1,000 Kaspersky Antivirus for Windows servers licenses for its network of servers across the Sultanate. It took less than four months for the Ministry to implement the full solution across its network.

"We are very proud to have won and implemented our superior antivirus solutions across the network of Oman's Ministry of Education," said Tarek Kuzbari, Managing Director, Kaspersky Lab, Middle East.

"This project demonstrates our ability to provide governmental institutions with bespoke solutions that meet their discerning and sensitive requirements.

"The Middle East's government sector ranks high among our regional priorities and the Ministry of Education of Oman is the latest in a long list of government institutions that have adopted Kaspersky Lab's security solutions."

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