Which Anti-Virus software should you use?

    Many people have Anti-Virus software, but is it the best one? I usually don't recommend to get an Anti-Virus/firewall bundle, as one company makes a better firewall, while another makes a better Anti-Virus. In this post, I will tell you which Anti-Virus/firewall software I recommend, and which ones to avoid.

   Let's start with free options. There are quite a few free Anti-Virus options out there, but most only work for a limited time, or have limited functionality. If you really don't want to spend money on this, then I recommend Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. I have used this, and so have many of my friends and family, and it works great. It is perfect for a short term solution while you try to figure out what software to purchase. This is both a fire wall and a anti virus, and The ones I recommend you avoid are Avast and AVG, both free and premium versions. These are considered a joke by the very people who code and spread malware. This is nothing personall, they just are not that great. A good free firewall is Comodo. Combinng these two is a fairly decent security solution. Now onto a great paid solution.

Note, these ads lead to paid or premium version of the product

    My favorite and, I think, best Anti-Virus is ESET's Nod32. It is one of the most up to date and fastest updating firewalls out there. This is the Anti-Virus that I use, and have for awhile. I recommend that you stay away from Norton products, the source of these have been leaked to the public, making it much easier for malware authors to avoid or bypass it. For firewall I recommend Kaspersky. It is one of the more "feared" firewalls for hackers and malware authors. These two togethor should be good enough to stop most attempted attacks. Always remember though, even the NSA gets hacked, so if you're not carefull, you can be another victim to a yet unkown zero day. so be sure to stay safe online.

Which Anti-Virus and/or Firewall software do you prefer and why?

Mobile adware on the rise

    As many of you may know, there are many apps that are not entirely beneficial, most being for andriod phones. Now that so many people have a smart phone, malware creators are starting to focus more and more on making malicious apps. These can not only steal your personall data, or harass you and your friends with spam and ads, it also drains your battery. A recent survey has shown that about 12% of phones run out of battery completely each day. This can be very annoying, and with 60% of people saying that battery life is the main selling point, very costly.

A trend micro study on battery usage

    Adware is now incorporated into many apps, and while most ads are displayed legitimatly, they can now create illigitimate "notifications" or icons, that, when clicked, lead to the advertisers website. Many of these ads also steal your personall info, most of them without any sort of notification that they are doing this. They collect and send data in the background, and burn through your battery life and data usage.

    There are many free antivirus apps that can protect agains most common threats, and also many paid apps. I personally recommend either Sophos mobile security, or ESET's mobile app. They can be found here and here, respectively (Sophos being free, ESET a paid app).

Credits:
Trend Micro

Extended Silence

I have been gone for awhile and I intend to start posting once again. I was pursuing another one of my many interests but I am back now.

I will post the source code of a java virus I found, heavily commented, for all of you interested in the inner workings of a virus. I also hope this will cause anti-virus companies to start paying more attention to Java jars and such as there are many files like jars that AVs do not scan. A jar is essentially treated as a compressed archive, and not as an executable program. This needs to change as I have seen a large rise in java viruses myself.
Anyway, check back soon if you're interested.

New variant of Zeus includes ransomware.

Ransomware is quickly becoming one of the more popular malware features. It encrypts all the users files, disabling them from doing anything unless a certain sum of money is sent to a specified account, usually via liberty reserve. A new Zeus variant has been discovered that also has this feature. Some of the code is shown below in Figure 1.

Figure 1

While this is dangerous, and probably still not yet fully implemented, it is very simple to unlock your computer. Once you make the payment, a new registry entry is created that prompts Zeus to un-encrypt your files. This makes it quite simple to remove the encryption. Here are steps to follow.


1. boot the system in safe mode
2. add a new key named syscheck under HKEY_CURRENT_USER
3. create a new DWORD value under the syscheck key
4. set the name of the new DWORD value to Checked
5. set the data for the Checked value to 1
6. reboot

This should cause Zeus to un-encrypt all your files and you can remove it from there (simply run a virus scan using something like: Norton AntiVirus 2012 or Malwarebytes Anti-Malware

thanks for reading, remember to comment on what I should post next.
credits to The Hacker News for images and un-encryption steps and research data