TechBlog

Planning a romantic Valentine’s Day for your loved one? Is there is no end to all that you can do to add even more sparkle this dreamy day? Perhaps a bottle of wine, flowers, or a lovely gift to impress him/her—and if you aren’t with anyone, there are even dating services available that provide you with options to meet a date. As Dermot Harnett mentioned in A Brilliant Proposal: Stay Away from Valentine’s Day Spam!, for spammers, Valentine’s Day is a great target. We’ve observed several spam email message styles related to this upcoming event. Gift options, flower delivery, dating service, med spam to spice up your relationship, and much more. Here are some common header lines that Symantec has tracked relating to Valentine’s Day: ...

Adobe has published a security bulletin about security vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player. In all versions up to the recent 10.0.42.34 Flash objects could evade the Sandbox which would allow for unauthorized cross domain requests. The vulnerability is rated critical. The updated version 10.0.45.2 as well of a fixed build of Adobe AIR 1.5.3.1930 is available in the flash download center and the air download center, respectively. Users should apply the update ASAP and administrators in companies should roll the fixed software out soon, too. ...

🙂 (Mashable) — We’ve just confirmed with Google that the company has signed an agreement to acquire social search engine Aardvark. Google isn’t disclosing the terms, but news of the acquisition was first reported by TechCrunch, who put the figure at around $50 million. Google told us that it’s “signed an agreement to acquire Aardvark but don’t have any additional details to report at this time.” Aardvark is a relatively new startup from former Googlers that uses social distribution channels to get immediate answers to your questions. ...

It’s just a few more days before Valentine’s Day. As most people now are already preparing their celebration, malware authors are also getting ready to use this popular event to target users with their malicious intent. Here’s one example of a malicious file (2077ed17f0ad92dafb8fb7601570e06580e4b7f1) we’ve seen recently: Upon execution, it drops the following picture file greeting: Note: It seems that the malware writers are using valid images from legitimate Web sites. ...

Jerome Segura at ParetoLogic blogged about this yesterday: a rogue security product with a web page that tries to imitate that of the German AV company Avira (check out the red umbrella and the type face.) Hmmm. If this company has been providing “20 Years of Total Protection” how come its web site was just registered last year and why was it registered by a proxy service? The fake: ...

SAN FRANCISCO – Deep inside millions of computers is a digital Fort Knox, a special chip with the locks to highly guarded secrets, including classified government reports and confidential business plans. Now a former U.S. Army computer-security specialist has devised a way to break those locks. The attack can force heavily secured computers to spill documents that likely were presumed to be safe. This discovery shows one way that spies and other richly financed attackers can acquire military and trade secrets, and comes as worries about state-sponsored computer espionage intensify, underscored by recent hacking attacks on Google Inc. ...

The Google Chrome stable channel has been updated to 4.0.249.89 for Windows. Security Fixes and rewards: Please see the Chromium security page for more detail. Note that the referenced bugs may be kept private until a majority of our users are up to date with the fix. Congratulations to Timothy D. Morgan on receiving a Chromium Security Reward for bug 32718. Note that Timothy elected to donate the reward to the Haiti relief effort, so Google raised the donation to $1337. ...

The creators behind the rogue antispyware appliaction WiniGuard have released yet another clone of their software. This one is called SafePcAV. SafePcAV spreads by showing fake online scanners. Once installed it will show hundreds of false infections. To remove these infections it requires the user to pay and license the software. If your computer is infected with this you must remove it soon, Click Here to learn how to remove it.

Putting laptop in sleep mode is a common thing that we do to save power and perform our work at a later stage without much delay. But for some users there is a problem while they try to resume from sleep mode. As the resuming begins, a blank screen appears with a mouse pointer and stays until you press any key or click the mouse. This problem may be fixed by a HotFix named KB958685 released by Microsoft for Vista and Windows7 users and should be only used if you are facing this problem. ...

Symantec has observed a new trend in phishing in which the phishing Web page contains pornographic content. The phishing site states that the end user can obtain free pornography after logging in or signing up. These offers tempt users into entering their credentials in the hopes of obtaining pornography. The attackers use several offers of pornography as bait. Some of the offers are adult chat, social networking with adult personals for sexual favors, blogs with free pornography, and so on. The screenshot below is an example of a phishing website using a leading information services brand. The site states that they provide email alerts for sex parties: ...