Get Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro for free

There are plenty of free security tools out there, but few include technical support, and many of them bug you with ads and nag screens.

Those are just two of the reasons to spend a few bucks on a pro-level antivirus solution. Of course, why spend a few bucks when you don't have to? Until tomorrow, you can get Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro 1.3 absolutely free. Regular price: $29.95.

As with most paid AV programs, that price is for a one-year license--and so is this freebie. Next year at this time, you can decide if you want to pony up for another year, or just stick with the feature-reduced (but still very effective) free version.

Cloud Antivirus Pro promises protection from viruses, spyware, and rootkits. It can disable Autorun to help protect you from viruses that propagate via flash drives, and the Pro version includes "automatic USB vaccination" to keep you from getting or spreading that kind of malware. (Interestingly, I just had such an encounter with an infected flash drive.)

Also included with the Pro version: 24-7 multilingual tech support. For anyone who wouldn't have a clue what to do in the event of a virus infestation, that could prove mighty helpful.

You can read more about Panda Cloud Antivirus over at CNET's Download Blog. As noted there, "during the registration process, the checkout cart will state at some point, 'Your card hasn't been charged yet.' This is apparently a cart template and does not affect users who are taking part in the license key giveaway." So don't freak out.

I continue to rely on Microsoft Security Essentials for malware protection, but just the other day I had to rescue my parents' laptop from an infection that MSE missed. Maybe a pro-level tool like Cloud Antivirus would have done a better job.


Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13845_3-20021017-58.html#ixzz13ioS3nss

Password advice from the father of the firewall

Russian programmer Dmitry Zavalishin is working on a revolutionary new concept for an operating system. In Zavalishin’s Phantom OS, snapshots of the entire system will be continually saved to disk, preserving state for running applications and active data. There are no files in the traditional sense, instead a file is merely an object with persistent state. Neat!

Phantom is new, but it can currently boot, execute applications, and continually save system state to disk. A GUI is planned, as are cross-development tools. The new OS is planning to support interpreted scripting languages like Ruby and Python, and virtual machine programming languages like C# and Java. What, no perl?!

The saved-state nature of Phantom makes it a real contender for both the mobile market, as well as servers. Switch off your phone running Phantom and then turn it back on with no loss of data or apparent interruption in what you were doing. For server environments, a power loss may no longer be a big deal.

It’s great to see real innovation in the OS space. Challenging the status quo may mean that Phantom has an uphill battle before it, but it’s refreshing to see people reallAs more and more personal business is conducted online, passwords (make that dozens of passwords) have become a necessary evil of daily life. We all know the rules for coming up with good passwords, or at the very least we hopefully know there are rules—choose an alphanumeric combination, don't write it down, don't use it for multiple accounts, etc.

Despite this guidance, "people are lousy at picking passwords that computers can't guess, especially computers with multi-core processors," Bill Cheswick said at a cyber security conference held recently at New York Institute of Technology. Cheswick has some credibility in this area. In addition to his current position as lead member of AT&T Research's technical staff, he played a key role in developing the first firewall systems more than two decades ago.

The cyber security pioneer ran through about a dozen different corporate password creation policies from a variety of companies and concluded, "These rules don't make anything more secure." Even the longest and most complicated password is useless if it fall into the wrong hands.

Cheswick offered instead his "non-moronic password rule": A password should be an alphanumeric combination that a family member or friend can't guess in five tries, and it should be complex enough so a person can't figure it out by watching you type it one time. If you need a reminder, rather than writing down the password itself, write down something that will remind you of the password.

It's also important to weigh the value of the information you are protecting. Cheswick breaks this down to three levels. The "who cares?" category is for any account that simply provides access to information, such as an online subscription to The New York Times. If someone steals the password, the most they can do is read the publication or perhaps fill out a survey, so feel free to reuse passwords for these sites.

Other accounts deserve more protection and their passwords should be created and guarded more carefully. On one level are accounts where it would be "inconvenient" if a password were stolen, but the consequences (i.e. someone ordering a book via your Amazon.com account) could be rectified with some effort. Accounts demanding the highest level of protection are those that enable you to access bank accounts, trade stocks or otherwise deal with financial matters.

Of course, the bad guys have all sorts of ways of stealing your log-in information, and many of these thefts are no fault of the password holder, Cheswick said. Some of the most common ways for passwords to be stolen are through keystroke loggers, phishing attacks and password database hacks.

Keystroke loggers are typically installed on a person's computer without their knowledge when they download software or images from unsavory or compromised Web sites. Phishing attacks are delivered via e-mails posing to be from your bank, credit card provider or some other seemingly trusted source. Clicking on links in these bogus e-mails will take you to equally bogus Web sites created to resemble a bank or credit card company's site. When you try to log in, your information is captured. Hackers often attack password databases (such as those maintained by financial institutions or Internet service providers) directly, where they can steal dozens or even hundreds of passwords.

In these cases, much of the security burden falls on your bank, Internet service provider or whomever else is in charge of protecting your information. One way for them to improve security is to limit the number of password guesses, locking an account if the limit is exceeded. Unlocking such accounts should also be carefully thought through. If a Web site offers a secondary question for authentication, that question should be related to the password rather than you yourself, Cheswick said, noting that it's not too difficult to figure out the "maiden name" of a person's mother. thinking outside the box.

Source: scientificamerican.com

Adobe Releases Flash Player Security Update

As expected, Adobe Systems Inc. issued a security bulletin repairing 32 vulnerabilities in Flash Player.

Adobe on Thursday released a security bulletin to patch 32 vulnerabilities in Flash Player, including a critical flaw that antivirus companies have seen being exploited in the wild.

The vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to take control of a system, Adobe warned.

The company recommended that all users with Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and earlier versions upgrade to the newest version, Flash Player 10.1.53.64. Adobe AIR 1.5.3.9130 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh and Linux are also affected and the company recommended that users update to Adobe AIR 2.0.2.12610.

The critical flaw that is being exploited in the wild also affects Adobe Reader and Acrobat; Adobe plans to provide a security update for those products on June 29.

source: techtarget.com

eScan has announced the launch of its latest version for protection of Linux systems - eScan for Linux version 3.0. According to eScan, this solution works fine for both Linux desktops and file servers.

eScan for Linux Version 3.0 boasts of an improved antivirus engine that is claimed to enable quicker scanning and better detection of the latest threats. It can read inside the data stream and virtually scans all types of files; including zipped and archived files to detect threats. It allows the user to run preset action like disinfect the file or delete the infected file or rename it or prompt for action. It also provides the user commonly seen features (on Windows based antivirus softwares) like scheduling an automatic scanning and downloading of updates.

The software is available for major Linux distro's including Debian, Fedora, RedHat, Slackware, Suse and Ubuntu. You might want to visit the eSacn website for more on this.

Source: techtree.com

Tips for protecting Windows 7 with Anti-Virus Program

An anti-virus program or software is a critical part of any Microsoft operating system that interacts with other systems, especially if it is connected to the Internet and works with browser, email, or instant messenger traffic. It looks like everyone has his or her favorite anti-virus solution and it is different from everyone else’s. For personal desktop systems, however, there are some rules of thumb that seem to be fairly universal among security experts:

Don’t run two anti-virus programs- Running two anti-virus applications at the same time is just asking for trouble. Whether it is because their real-time scanners fight over access and between the two of them can slow your PC to a crawl, or because one might misidentify virus signature files maintained by the other as actual virus infections, many problems can crop up that make using two desktop anti-virus programs effectively incompatible with each other.
Scan the entire Windows 7 PC- A real-time scanner is not enough. You should also make sure you perform full-system scans frequently, and automate the process with a scheduled nightly scan if possible. Real-time scanners only finds an incoming virus before it infects your PC if it happens to pass through a point of access that the scanner can effectively protect, and even then sometimes something might get through before there is a virus signature available for your Anti-Virus program.
Get Anti-Virus with a real-time scanner- You require an on-access, real-time scanner to ensure that some of the most common infection vectors for viruses and worms are checked live, to prevent an infection from spreading when your system first encounters the virus or worm. Real-time scanning can be a real burden on system performance, and there may be times when you would want to disable it to increase your performance, but you need to be very careful about that. Surfing the Web and checking email are not the times to turn off your anti-virus real-time scanner for extra performance.

Install your Anti-Virus program before connecting to the Internet- Any Microsoft Windows system should have anti-virus program installed before connecting to the Internet. We have seen malware insinuate itself onto a computer in less time than it took to download anti-virus software to use on the system. If you have not seen that, and you use that as evidence you do not need to worry about anti-virus until after you have opened a browser and visited to a Website where you can download Anti-virus software.

Don't trust default Anti-Virus program- Norton and McAfee, once among the most trusted anti-virus programs for Windows users. Now a days, most home desktop security experts recommend that any system that comes with any default anti-virus program get something else installed instead, as quickly as possible.
Other factors can play a vital role in protecting against virus infection, of course. A good firewall good user practices when browsing the Web, checking email, or downloading files and even Microsoft Windows 7 User Account Control can help sometimes.

PC Security is not difficult

These days, computers are essential for every person to fulfill basic needs. Computers come under the contact of virus when they are connected to Internet. I have experienced this when I purchased a brand new computer. As I am a gaming freak, I decided to get a new Internet connection in order to download games available online. I searched games on the net and download the executable files of the desirable game. My computer took couple of minutes to download the game and then I installed the game. After the game was installed, I observed something penasty with my computer. Some applications stopped working, blue screen of death problem and Windows freezed suddenly. My computer had been infected by severe viruses present in the executable file of game.
So I searched on Internet about virus attacks and I came to know about the various methods to avoid virus threats in your computer. Some basic practices, which I have exercised in order to prevent virus threats are mentioned below.
• Make sure that disks and files you run on your computer should be authentic.
• Don’t try the disks which have been used in other computers and don’t download files from unauthentic websites as well as avoid opening e-mail attachments without scanning.
• Download the antivirus software in order to detect the virus present in your computer.
• Install updates from the antivirus software website. Then the antivirus software will be able identify the virus and delete it.
• Download and install any software patches or other programs that will help you eliminate the virus. Or follow any instructions you find on deleting the virus manually.
• Try to scan all the files with the extensions .doc, .com, .xls and .ppt etc with antivirus software. Virus mostly present in the files with these extensions.
By following the above-mentioned instructions, I removed some infections from my computer but my computer was not yet completely free of malicious programs. Then I decided to go for technical support providers in order to make my PC secure. Everyone needs PC security to avoid unauthentic access to the data stored in the computer.
So if you find any difficulty while removing severe viruses from your computer then go for technical support firms who provide dedicated technical support to protect your PC against the virus attack. Their Microsoft Certified technicians will access your computer remotely and resolve the issue within fraction of seconds. So imagine the world with unlimited hassle-free Technical Support 24/7/365.

Get Latest Laptops and Enjoy Computing

Acer offers a wide range of laptops, notebooks, and desktops and satiates the requirements of both the professionals as well as homer users.
Features:
The latest laptop series- Acer Aspire 8940G comes with dual-channel DDR3 SDRAM support, Dolby optimized Acer CineSurround sound system, Acer Bio-Protection fingerprint solution, etc. This laptop is integrated with Acer Instant On Arcade, Acer Bio-Protection, Acer Crystal Eye, Acer Launch Manager, Acer eRecovery Management, Adobe Reader, NTI Media Maker, etc.
Usability:
With the use of Acer Aspire 8940G, you can get exciting entertainment experience due to the Blu-ray optical technology. You can easily connect with anyone, because of its built-in webcam, stereo microphones, and Wi-Fi connectivity.
Limitations:
While working with the Acer laptop, you can face any technical issue like, blue screen error, system crash, hard disk failure, driver conflict, etc. In such a condition, you should go for Acer support provider, so that, your system can become fit and healthy once again.
In case, you face any technical issue with your Acer laptop, you can contact any service provider for assistance. Many technical service providers offer remote support for all Acer laptops. Services offered through remote support are enlisted as:
• Installation, re-installation, and un-installation of software
• Troubleshooting software errors
• Configuring settings for Office suite, Internet, e-mail, etc.
• PC Optimization
• Data backup
• Virus and spyware removal
All the above services are offered through remote connection. While accessing online support for your Acer laptop, tech expert will access your system via online and will diagnose your system. Thereafter, they will perform the necessary steps to resolve your technical issues related to Acer laptop.

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