Lavasoft Blog
Here’s a little cyber world humor for you today –
While Internet Explorer 6 is still alive and kicking (as of last month, reports say, it still held almost 20 percent of the browser market share), many would like to see it dead and buried. So much so, in fact, that tongue-in-cheek funerals are being staged for the ‘aging’ browser, complete with obituaries, memorial services and eulogies, CNN reports.
Big news today in terms of battling botnets:
Spanish authorities have taken down one of the world’s largest botnets, and have arrested three of the alleged masterminds behind it.
One day after Microsoft announced they were investigating new vulnerabilities in their Windows operating system, one of their executives was at the RSA conference in San Francisco suggesting a tax on all Internet users as an attempt to curtail the spread of malware.
The proposal was likened to the current health plan model that is being pushed in the United States, a social model where everyone pays for the good of the whole.
A word of caution: Microsoft has issued a warning on an unpatched vulnerability that could affect users of Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003, running Internet Explorer.
“The vulnerability exists in the way that VBScript interacts with Windows Help files when using Internet Explorer,” the security advisory reads. “If a malicious Web site displayed a specially crafted dialog box and a user pressed the F1 key, arbitrary code could be executed…”
PC World recently published its list of the greatest free downloads and services, and named Lavasoft’s own Ad-Aware as one of its top 10 classic products of all-time, alongside the likes of OpenOffice, Evite, and other user favorites.
Thanks to PC World for spotlighting Lavasoft’s long experience in online security (after all, we are the original anti-spyware company) – and our commitment to providing Ad-Aware Free completely free of charge for computer users around the world, no strings attached!
This week, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported that it has identified ‘widespread data breaches’ on peer-to-peer file sharing networks. The FTC notified nearly 100 organizations, including large and small businesses, schools, and local governments, that the sensitive personal information of employees and customers was available on P2P file sharing networks.
There’s long been disagreement surrounding the topic of the rights of organizations to monitor the activity of their computers or those on their networks. An alleged invasion of privacy case centering on a high school in Pennsylvania, USA has revived the debate this past week, and brought in a new angle to it – what rights do students and school administrators have?
Following this week’s release of version 8.2 of Ad-Aware, Lavasoft became aware of an issue with scanning that affected a limited number of our Ad-Aware users. This has only affected users of Windows XP (Home and Professional).
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or concern this may have caused. Lavasoft’s developers prioritized this issue in order to promptly resolve it, and a software update to fix the issue has now been released. In order to resolve the issue, please update Ad-Aware by clicking “Web Update.”
A new study released by fraud analysis firm Javelin Strategy & Research found that identity fraud rose to record rates this past year. According to Javelin’s “2010 Identity Fraud Survey Report”:
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