News

Avira TechBlog: Great news – our Avira Premium Security Suite received the next AV-Test.org certificate, this time for the first quarter of 2011! So far the suite thus achieved all available AV-Test.org certificates since the beginning of the certification process. The certificate approves the tested products a good quality in detection, repair and usability. This means that users of the Avira Premium Security Suite can be assured to be well protected from the threats they face when using their computers on the Internet! ...

Avira TechBlog: The series continues – Avira AntiVir Personal and Avira AntiVir Professional received the April 2011 VB100 award! The tests were executed in a Windows XP SP3 environment by the Virus Bulletin test engineers. The Avira anti malware solutions performed very well: All WildList samples were detected, all of the polymorphic viruses too. Also, more than 99 percent of the Worms and Bots were blocked. The heuristics test also looks very good: With 96 percent of the yet unknown malware samples filtered out Avira ranks among the best solutions! ...

Follow up from: Hacker Gains Access To WordPress.com Servers Tech Crunch: WordPress.com has revealed that someone has gained root-access (“low-level,” as in deep) to several of its servers this morning and that VIP customers’ source code was accessible. WordPress.com VIP customers are all on “code red” and in the process of changing all the passwords/API keys they’ve left in the source code. “Tough note to communicate today: Automattic had a low-level (root) break-in to several of our servers, and potentially anything on those servers could have been revealed. ...

BetaNews: Google found itself fending off criticisms from competitor Microsoft on Monday over whether or not its Google Apps product truly had an important government security clearance. Called the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) standard, the Mountain View, Calif. company claimed on its webpage that the Government version of Apps had it. It didn’t. Instead, Google Apps Premier had the proper certification, while the more restrictive Government version was still in the process of getting FISMA certified. This is required by some government agencies in order to participate and win bids for any IT contract. ...

H-Online: In a post on the project’s security announce mailing list, Ubuntu Release Manager Kate Stewart has reminded users that the desktop version of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, code named Hardy Heron, will reach its end of life in May. Version 8.04 of the Debian-derived Linux distribution was released on 24 April 2008. Based on the 2.6.24 Linux kernel, it placed a stronger focus on stability and ease of use, rather than on new features, and included the GNOME 2.22 desktop environment, as well as a new installer that allowed Ubuntu to be installed directly under Windows without having to boot from CD or re-partition the hard disk. Built-in applications included version 2.4 of the OpenOffice.org office suite, Firefox 3.0 Beta 5, the F-Spot photo manager and the GIMP image editor. After 12 May 2011, no new updates, including security updates and critical fixes, will be available. The server edition of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS will continue to be supported until May 2013. ...

H-Online: It’s a record for Microsoft: 9 critical and 8 important updates close a total of 64 security holes. In the worst case, a number of the vulnerabilities allow for remote code execution; in other words, arbitrary code can be injected and executed, such as from specially crafted documents and websites. Microsoft put 44 of them in the category Exploitability Index 1, meaning that the code that exploits the flaw will probably go into circulation soon. ...

Thanks to my friend, Pondus! Ars Technica: Hundreds of thousands of URLs have been compromised—at the time of writing, 694,000 (it’s over millions of site when you are reading this)—in an enormous and indiscriminate SQL injection attack. The attack has modified text stored in databases, with the result that pages served up by the attacked systems include within each page one or more references to a particular JavaScript file. ...

Google Talk Guru is a new Google bot that lets you ask simple questions. It’s “an experimental service that allows people to get information like sports results, weather forecasts, definitions etc via chat. It works on many popular chat applications that support Google Talk.” Send an invitation to **guru**@googlelabs.com in Gmail Chat, Google Talk or any other Jabber client and find simple facts like “weather in London”, “amplitude definition”, “translate souris”, “2^8”, “web stanford” (which returns the top Google result for [stanford]). ...

In a bid to make Google Docs more appealing to workers and consumers, Google is rolling out a new feature that lets users of its productivity service discuss shared documents in real-time. The upgrade is aimed at helping users resolve issues faster. The new discussion feature is also part of Google’s ongoing effort to dethrone Microsoft Office as the leader in productivity apps. By enabling more real-time discussions, Google is building off the strength of its cloud-based approach to apps and recognizes the way users increasingly are accustomed to communicating online. ...

I just read an interesting post in ThinkVitamin.com and wanted to share with you: I just signed up for a new Twitter account and as I was going through the on-boarding process, I noticed Twitter has introduced a bit of Gamification to encourage you to follow more people. They use a simple progress-bar metaphor to encourage you to follow 10 people. I like it.