Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Sharif Al Motawally

Visit the excellent Security Blog By Dr. Eric Cole of McAfee. He delves deep into Advanced Persistent Threats and explains what to do and what not to do to counter these threats.

“APT, the Advanced Persistent Threat, is the buzz word that everyone is using. Companies are concerned about it, the government is being compromised by it and consultants are using it in every presentation they give.

One of the main reasons organizations are broken into today is because they are fixing the wrong vulnerabilities. If you fix the threats of three years ago, you will lose. APT allows organizations to focus on the real threats that exist today.”

via McAfee Security Insights Blog » Blog Archive » Advanced Persistent Threat (APT).

Common Email Sending Mistakes

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Sharif Al Motawally

When sending a message to more than 3 people especially if they do not know each other, please put everyone in the BCC field instead of TO or CC. This way no one will see the other recipients’ emails.

Also if you receive a message that includes compelling well-crafted information asking you to forward to all your friends 99.999% of the time it is a fake or a hoax.

Most likely it has originally been sent by spyware, virus and spam writers to collect people addresses. When you forward it to everyone, this message contains all of our addresses as well as the addresses of previously forwarded people.

If one of the recipients has a virus or spyware program, it will collect all of those precious valid and verified email addresses and send them to the virus owner. They will sell it to spammers. and spam all your friends and you too.

So please make sure to ask an expert first about these messages before sending to everyone you know.

ANTIMALWARE: Panda USB Vaccine – Download FREE – PANDA SECURITY

Posted on February 13, 2010 by Sharif Al Motawally

Panda USB Vaccine – free antimalware to block malware spreading through USB drives.

There is an increasing amount of malware which, like the dangerous Conficker worm, spreads via removable devices and drives such as memory sticks, MP3 players, digital cameras, etc. To do this, these malicious codes modify the AutoRun file on these devices.

Panda USB Vaccine is a free solution designed to protect against this threat. It offers a double layer of preventive protection, allowing users to disable the AutoRun feature on computers as well as on USB drives and other devices:

Vaccine for computers: This is a ‘vaccine' for computers to prevent any AutoRun file from running, regardless of whether the device (memory stick, CD, etc.) is infected or not.

Vaccine for USB devices: This is a ‘vaccine' for removable USB devices, preventing the AutoRun file from becoming a source of infection. The tool disables this file so it cannot be read, modified or replaced by malicious code.

This is a very useful tool as there is no simple way of disabling the AutoRun feature in Windows. This provides users with a simple way of disabling this feature, offering a high degree of protection against infections from removable drives and devices.

via ANTIMALWARE: Panda USB Vaccine – Download FREE – PANDA SECURITY.