Happy belated New Year’s from Lavasoft. Here are three simple ways you can start the new year with increased online security and peace of mind.

Change Your Passwords

In addition to having up-to-date antivirus software, ad blockers are becoming a must-have extension to keep you protected online. Here are five ways in which an ad blocker keeps you and your loved ones safe: 

Protects You from Malicious Ads

1.  Right now 220 million global users have an ad blocker installed on their desktop computer. That’s 4x the number of users since 2013.

2. That number is even higher for mobile users: at least 419 million people are blocking ads on their mobile devices today. That’s 22% of the world’s 1.9 billion smartphone users.

For the fourth time in as many months, Adobe has released another critical update to its Flash software. The update addresses a new zero day vulnerability that was discovered last week. Such zero day vulnerabilities are not known to the creators of the vulnerable software or to the public. Subsequently, they can be exploited by cybercriminals to infect computers and mobile devices running the software. 

If your default search engine was changed and your browser keeps redirecting you to http://trovigo.com that means your browser was hijacked with Trovi Search.  It is able to become the startup page of your web browser via modifying browser settings. No matter which browser you are using (Internet Explorer, Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Opera), you can see the browser is occupied by it completely. To protect your homepage in the future download Web Companion.