“A select group of VIP web developers, designers, bloggers and press begin receiving their invitations to an event we’re holding in San Francisco on September 15th to celebrate the Beauty of the Web and to mark the launch of the IE9 Beta.” - The Windows Blog.

Way back in March of this year they allowed the public to test drive Internet Explorer 9, wich had great interest. Have you tested it? Will you be attending the above event? Tell us your thoughts on IE9, whatever it is.

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“About a third of anti-malware products tested by Virus Bulletin failed to secure Windows Vista Business Edition SP2 with several “crumbling” under the pressure of a heavy attack.

Of the 54 products tested by the vendor, 19 failed to reach the standard required for VB100 certification, the latest Virus Bulletin report said.

The VB100 tests assessed anti-malware products against a test set from the WildList – a list of viruses known to be circulating on computers that is maintained by a group of anti-virus researchers.

Products had to detect 100 percent of the malware contained in the WildList test set and “not generate any false alarms when scanning a set of clean files” to achieve VB100 certification.

Some of the products tested by Virus Bulletin in August produced false alarms on clean files from the likes of Corel, Roxio and Adobe.”

Some of those that failed the test were BitDefender, Lavasoft Total Security, McAfee Total Protection, McAfee, CA Consumer, CA Business and GDATA. Just to name a few.

How does this affect you? Tell us your thoughts. Has your tool been listed as failing this test? Share your feelings. View this post in our support forum also.

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“The Cyber Security Challenge is a series of national online games and competitions that will test the cyber security abilities of individuals and teams from every walk of life. It is designed to excite and inspire anyone considering a career in the cyber security industry.

The Challenge will identify talented individuals capable of becoming part of the UK’s cyber security profession now and in the future.”

You can read that and more over at CyberSecurityChallenge.org.uk.

Are you considering taking part? Or do you have some thoughts about it all? Tell us.

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SUPERAntiSpyware.com, a Pacific Northwest developer of state-of-the-art security software, has announced acceptance into Virus Total’s (virustotal.com) independent file analyzing service.

“VirusTotal provides an absolutely necessary service to spyware/malware researchers worldwide,” said Nick Skrepetos, founder of SUPERAntiSpyware.com. “This free service allows researchers and users alike to submit suspicious files and have them analyzed by over 40 of the top anti-virus and anti-spyware products. We are very proud to have SUPERAntiSpyware’s detection engine included. VirusTotal’s staff was extremely helpful and a pleasure to work with while integrating SUPERAntiSpyware into their service.”

Virus Total is a free, independent service that analyzes suspicious files and facilitates detection of malware. The service utilizes anti-virus and anti-spyware engines from over 40 of the top companies to detect file submissions and provide detailed analysis and statistics.

SUPERAntiSpyware, in use by over 30 million users worldwide, is an innovative product that protects users from Spyware, Malware, Adware, Trojans, Rootkits, Homepage Hi-Jackers, Worms, Dialers and Parasites. SUPERAntiSpyware focuses on detecting hard to remove spyware which other products often miss, or are unable to safely detect and remove.

Press release (PDF): http://superantispyware.com/media/Press_Release_VirusTotal.pdf
Other Release: http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/74390/

Discuss this matter in detail in our forum here.

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SCars Beta v0.6.5b2 is the fouth installment of beta versions since we released it earlier this year. So you could call it SCars Beta 4.

Here is what is diferent and new in the latest version:

Changelog:

[Fixed] Language menu bug
[Fixed] Notification size on systems with larger font settings
[Changed] Improved notification appearance
[Added] Due-date/time optionally displayed on notifications
[Added] ‘Once’ and ‘Yearly’ frequency options
[Added] Latest news on update tab

It’s not a major update as such, but does fix and improve several features that SCars has currently. We’re developing the next major feature of SCars as we speak, so we can almost be certain that the next version or after will be a major upgrade before we can finalise SCars to it’s first full version out of Beta.

How can you download SCars? We have four download locations, so there is a wide choice. But here are two:

http://scars.securitycadets.com/download.php
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/SCars/1273694727/1

To report bugs or problems for this version, please visit this topic. For general technical support or suggestions, visit SCars Support.

For more info, visit http://scars.securitycadets.com/

Steven Burns, a fellow researcher, posted this on his blog the other day:

“On the hunt as usual, I came across yet another rogue, again using xorg.pl etc via blackhat SEO, but using .tk domains (surprise surprise). What I did find rather humorous however, was a javascript file that was loaded.

The javascript contained a lovely little snippet, and a note for the folks over at Eset (though evidently, the bad guys got their Star Wars and Star Trek mixed up, as it was the Borg that said Resistance is futile – not anyone from Star Wars)“;

/*hello nod32 guys; the force is strong with u, young Padawans, but u won’t defeat us; any resistance is futile;*/

The file in question appears to be:

hxxp://www2.megosave2.tk/107ad6ae3feaa24b00263864f0be76edbcf43009611.js

(Do not copy into your browser!)

The guys at Sunbelt also blogged about this with a view graphics to show you some of the messages to ESET.

So what do you do if you are ESET? Well to be truthful, nothing other than blocking the URL’s in any software that ESET have for computer users. There is not a lot you can do because the minute the URL’s get taken down, new URL’s will appear. Besides, traking down .tk tld’s is not proving easy.

Have you had any rogues installed on your system via whatever means? Get free help here. Our forum topic on this lists all domains with the javascript which you find here.

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Symantec today blogged about spam e-mail making the rounds that looks like the following hoping to lure recipients into downloading a Facebook toolbar:

(Image is the property of Symantec.com)

And should you click on the “Download Here” button you will get a file called “toolbar.exe”. Click on it’s properties and you will find the following information:

(Image is the property of Symantec.com)

So as you can see, there is some mentioned this file to be associated with HijackThis, an analysis tool by Trend Micro. Symantec detect this file as a Trojan.Dropper. HijackThis is a legit tool and Facebook have not released a toolbar dubbed HijackThis.

Be carefull what you click on as some disguise themselves differently to others. And should you come across a suspicious e-mail, report it. You can report anything like the above to us by contacting us. And get support from us if you have been caught out by similar things in our support forums.

Discuss this matter in detail here. Stay in touch – Twitter, Facebook.

Yes, today, 8th of April 2010, marks our birthday. Today we turn four! Four years old, heh? It seems only yesterday was our first.

The last year has been a busy one. Maybe not in public, but certainly in the background. We’ve released our first piece of software and we’ve continued the free computer support in the support forums. And continued to recognise the ability of individuals with a few promotions (1,2).

This year will see no giveaways as we move forward in focusing our time and efforts on SCars and other projects. But please post your messages of support to our staff members who volunteer in giving you support.

As always we are thankful and greatful to all volunteers and people who have donated. They all keep this site going. Without those two areas, we wouldnt be here. So, Happy Birthday to us and here is to another year where we try and tackle the bad guys!

Forum Announcement – Securitycadets’ – Four Years Old!

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Limewire is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) client for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other operating systems. However it is the peer-to-peer you have to question with it’s security and malware problems. Then add AVG in to that mixture of questions as to why they want a slice of the pie.

At this point you may be wondering what I am talking about. Well quote this:

“AVG Technologies, developers of the world’s most popular free anti-virus software, today announced that LimeWire LLC has licensed the AVG Anti-Virus SDK engine and has integrated the anti-virus/ anti-spyware protection into LimeWire Pro, its premium file sharing software. Through this partnership, all files will be scanned before LimeWire Pro will allow them to play or execute on an end user’s computer, which prevents infected files from harming machines. LimeWire Pro users will see the “Protected by AVG” assurance whenever a downloaded file is safely scanned and cleaned.” – AVG and LimeWire Secure World’s Largest Peer-to-Peer Network.

This may well be old news for some as the above press release was published last month. And to an extent has gone under the radar. However it is still significant and worthwhile for a mention.

Over the years peer-to-peer software has had it’s problems and been branded as unsafe by ourselves and experts of the same industry. For valid reasons. We even have our own P2P programs policy in the support forums because of it. And the service offered by AVG only stretches to the paid versions of Limewire.

What percentage of Limewire users have the free version and what percentage have the paid?

What percentage overall that uses this type of software have Limewire compared to others?

P2P will still remain unsafe whatever steps companies make. Individuals will always try and exploit it to push their malware onto computers with their methods. And we have not tested the inclusion of AVG with Limewire Pro. Nor will we in the future. The jury will remain out on this situation. However we believe it is a bad move by AVG.

One final thought. Who will benefit from this partnership? Limewire or AVG? And anyone remember Ewido Anti-Spyware?

Got an opinion about the above? Then share it here. All comments and thoughts are welcomed.

“This update caused BitDefender to flag Windows system files and BitDefender files as the Trojan.Fakealert.5 infection. Depending on a users action settings for when a virus is found, this has led to numerous Windows system files being added to the BitDefender quarantine. When this happens, these computers are not be able to boot into Windows.”

A mammoth 67 page forum topic at the BitDefender forums shows some of the frustrations of the problem. Not long after, Bit Defender released the following:

“Today (morning PST) we had an update for 64-bit systems (available on our servers between 8 AM and 11 30 AM PST) that caused multiple Windows and BitDefender files to be quarantined. We are creating a patch that will restore all quarantined files. The patch will be available shortly. We apologize for this error and we will work to prevent this from occurring again in the future.

BitDefender trojan alert update issue: BitDefender has released an alternative solution for users that are able to boot their systems. The details are available here http://www.bitdefender.com/site/KnowledgeBase/consumer/#638 . The solution for users that are not able to boot their system will be available shortly. Thanks for your understanding.

We would like to provide you with a current update regarding the Trojan.FakeAlert.5 issue:

Today BitDefender products running on Windows 64-bit systems experienced problems caused by a faulty update. Multiple BitDefender and Windows files have been incorrectly detected as Trojan.FakeAlert.5 and have been moved to quarantine. Based on the information we have, only .exe, .dll and other binary files have been quarantined (no pictures or documents). Consequently, on some systems BitDefender did not run anymore, applications did not work and/or Windows did not start on those systems.”

You can read that press release in full here – Trojan.FakeAlert.5 Update issue.

If you have been affected by this and require advice on how to resolve it, we offer free support on a range of problems. Visit our support forums and navigate to the correct subforum.

Have an opinion on this story? Share it here.

“The Platform Preview, and the feedback loop it is part of, marks a major change from previous IE releases,” said Dean Hachamovich, the browser team’s general manager.

(Screenshot of www.ietestdrive.com)

The preview is a 31MB download, and can be downloaded from the test trive site that Microsoft has set up – http://www.ietestdrive.com/.

If you choose to test it, be aware that it will not replace any previous version you may be running, but run alongside it. Got an opinion? Are you testing IE9 Preview? Discuss and tell here. We’ll be testing it in due course.

Source: Computerworld.com

SCars has been a long project for awhile now and it’s at that stage where we feel comfortable that it can be released to the general public.

What is SCars? To quote the SCars home page:

“SCars is a program designed to aid users in performing the regular computer maintenance tasks that should be undertaken to keep their computer working efficiently. Tasks such as updating Windows and security software, and cleaning temporary files are important to a computer’s health. In addition, SCars can be used to remind users of whatever they choose as it has the capability for users to create ‘custom’ reminders for any purpose.”

For a long time now, we have been developing this application which started from a small idea from some of our staff behind the scenes. At the time we were discussing overhauling our support forums. And from somewhere, it sparked a conversation about creating a tool. So that we can assist computer users not only via our website, but on their actual computer when they’re offline or online after we have assisted them. That was the start of a project which we then dubbed, Project X.

Overview

• Built-in computer Security and Maintenance reminders – all customizable
• Custom reminders for any purpose
• Automatic or manual updating available
• Multiple languages supported
• Full help and support available (more info)

For a run-down of the above visit the Features page.

We don’t expect at this stage to have a Pro version for which you pay for. As it stands it is a freeware application to recommend to anyone which will assist in maintaining a computer. All those who contribute, are volunteers. They have either been in a position themselves where they got infected and seeked help on similar websites like our own. So they know where most users come from. That is vital to the development of SCars to maintain it’s functions as it’s designed for.

Although this release is stable, we have not yet fully implemented all features. So for the first public version, it will be a Beta. We do want to remind anyone using it in the Beta version that testing will be at your own risk.

At this stage we’d like to thank everyone who has worked hard on SCars. You can see who has contributed on the SCars pages (more here). And should you have an opinion, chat about it in our forum.

Links of Interest:

SCars Home Pages

SCars Support Forum

You can read additional information at Security Garden and discuss it in detail in our support forums. We also provide support for Windows XP should you require it.

“Between the 1-26 February 2010, Scamnesty bins will be placed around the country in public places so you can bin those pesky scam letters you have received in the post. As well as letters and mailers some scammers send emails, text messages or will call you at your home. Now you can report these phone calls and forward us your suspected scam emails and websites and help us to beat the scammers!”

You can find more details about this project at the followin website:

http://www.consumerdirect.gov.uk/scamnesty/

We really recommend that you forward this message onto any UK resident for their attention. It is their chance to fight back. Discuss here.

BBC Technology reports – “Almost a half of those who did respond to a scam had lost more than £50, while 5% lost more than £5,000.

The OFT said 73% of adults had received a scam e-mail in the past year.

Some 6,500 people are also receiving letters from the authorities warning them that their names are on a “sucker list” being circulated by fraudsters.

The OFT is launching a “scamnesty”, calling on consumers to drop scam mailings into designated boxes at public places or into an online “bin”.”

Are you in Britain? Do you think you are one of those who falls for scams, whether directly or indirectly? Tell us!