TechBlog

As you may have heard in the last few days, Twitter has banned 370 passwords (actually only 369, ‘password’ appears twice in the list) as ‘too obvious’ to be safe for their users. A good move in theory but why are so few words banned? And what are they? The list is available in various places online, or even just by viewing the source of the Twitter sign up page. Sadly the sports fans in this Sophos office may be out of luck with both ‘boston’ and ‘redsox’ making the banned list. ...

Hopefully, the holiday season has found you spending a good amount of time offline: enjoying moments spent with friends and family, keeping long-standing traditions or creating new ones to follow for seasons to come, or just relaxing due to some downtime from work or school. It wouldn’t come as much of a surprise, though, if you’ve still found yourself spending a fair share of your time during the holidays online: checking status updates and posting new pictures on Facebook, or sending and checking tweets on Twitter. And, why not? These networking sites are an easy way to connect and share with the people we care about. ...

Antispyware Shield Pro is a phony security software, also known as a rogue. Antispyware Shield Pro uses fake security warnings and pop-up alerts to frighten people into thinking their PC is infected. Antispyware Shield Pro will not remove these supposed infections until you purchase the software. Do not fall for this scam, Antispyware Shield Pro is an infection itself. if your windows is infected with these kind of malware Click Here to learn how to remove it.

Total PC Defender is a rogue security software, a complete scam designed to rip people off. If Total PC Defender has infected your PC, you should remove it immediately. if your windows is infected with these kind of malware Click Here to learn how to remove it.

Atif Mushtaq, a researcher at FireEye security company, has coordinated a global effort to take down of one of the top 10 botnets – Mega-D. PC world said the botnet controlled 250,000 machines in a massive network that was responsible for nearly 12 percent of world spam according to Message Labs statistics. Mushtaq and those working with him coordinated their efforts with Internet service providers to isolate the Mega-D command-and-control servers in Israel, Turkey and the U.S. ...

Security researchers examining the directories of the URLs of some of the latest Koobface runs may stumble upon a Christmas greeting:

For those of you that are having to put up with looking after your parents over Christmas: Would you much rather selfishly indulge yourselves with partying? A kindly spammer has a very seasonal Christmas Eve message offering to make this the last year that you will have to “put up” with the burdens of family elders. But be careful that your own children don’t read this. Free Help Finding Senior Care for Mom or Dad ...

APCProtect is a phony security program, designed to rip people off. APCProtect uses scare tactics including false security warnings and system scan results that are false to frighten people into purchasing it. If APCProtect is installed on your computer, you should remove it immediately. if your computer is infected with this malware, you must remove it soon, Click Here to learn how to remove it.

Once again, we’d like to wish our readers Merry Christmas with a reference to the 1986 CHRISTMA EXEC worm Here’s a link to January 1987 Risks Digest, discussing the worm. And here’s a link to the original source code for this worm. Normally we wouldn’t link to malware code, but hey, it’s 23 years old.

AV-Comparatives Summary Reports 2009 Available! Summary Report 2009 AV-Comparatives Site: http://www.av-comparatives.org/ Read/Download Summary Here. Overall winners of 2009 (Best Products of the Year by AV-Comparatives): To be rated “Best Anti-Virus Product of 2009” by AV-Comparatives, an Anti-Virus product should preferably have very high detection rates (of malware and also potentially unwanted applications), high proactive on-demand detection (or provide proactive protection), very few false positives (FP), scan fast and reliably with a low system impact, provide good malware removal capabilities, protect the system against malware/websites with malicious software without relying too much on user decisions/interactions, cause no crashes or hangs, and have no annoying bugs. Based on the awards given by AV-Comparatives during 2009, several products got many high awards and are very close, so that we decided to award not only the Best Product of 2009 but also the second and third places (Silver and Bronze). Looking into the detail of the raw results, we decided to give the following awards: ...