The SmartSwipe Online Security, Shopping and Technology Blog

NSS Labs recently released the first in a series of lab tests to examine how much protection various anti-malware products provide. Their 'Live Testing' methodology claims to measure anti-malware performance in a real world environment. They test anti-malware the way an end user would use anti-malware and do not test against "stale samples" in a lab. Finally, their tests do not receive any funding from the anti-malware vendors whose products are involved in these tests.

When you combine malware that was caught (and blocked) while it was being downloaded with malware that was caught (and blocked) when it tried to run, Trend Micro's product finished in first place. It blocked an impressive 96.4% of all threats encountered over the 17 day testing regiment. ESET's offering finished last (of nine products) and only blocked 67.9% of all threats. The other vendors finished somewhere in between these two extremes.

I used to be so diligent.

Phonebusters would release their statistics for the previous month in identity theft and I would be right on it, frantically typing away in an effort to share the latest news with all of our readers. However, the last two months have seen a dramatic shift in my posting habits. Last month, I didn't write anything until the 20th and this month, I'm making my post on the 18th.

Websense released their State of Internet Security Report for the first half of 2009. While this report's conclusions are nothing new (malicious software, cybercrime, and spam are all growing more common), it does contain some particularly interesting statistics that I would like to share.

Here are some of the report's highlights:

• The number of malicious sites has grown by 671% over the last year.
• 77% of web sites with malicious content are actually legitimate sites that have been compromised by cyber criminals.
• 95% of comments on chat rooms, blogs and forums are either spam or malicious code.
• 57% of data stealing attacks are conducted over the web.

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Pandalabs released an interesting list of the top cyber security threats it has investigated over the course of its history. Pandalabs 20th anniversary site is quite entertaining and I encourage each of you to go through and learn more about each of these security threats.

There are some familiar names in this list and some that you may not have heard of, so, to make it easier to learn more, I linked every one of these threats to a page that seems to do a good job of explaining it. Here is the list:

Since this blog went live, we have published a few different stories on scareware. Dan McCann started things off and threw down the gauntlet with a great article about scareware. Then, I published some results of research that PandaLabs performed - this research demonstrated that scareware was growing at an incredibly fast pace.

And today came news that the New York Times, that venerable, highly respected publication was hosting a piece of scareware. While details are still scant, according to an article written by Riva Richmond, many viewers to the New York Times' web site were confronted with ads for scareware.

Our President just told me about this and I was so excited that I thought I should blog about it. Please feel free to pass this article around to all your friends and family.

Costco.ca has SmartSwipe available on their web site for $30 off! And, futureshop.ca has SmartSwipe available for $20 off.

People who spread malicious software via the web are smart. They are adept at watching the news, predicting search trends, and gaming search engines so that their malware infested pages can rank high for 'soon-to-be-popular' search terms. To do this, they use a variety of legitimate tools (such as Google's amazing Insights for Search tool) and a variety of 'black-hat' search tactics (such as paid links, building a group of interlinked pages, and injecting links on fraternity guest books).

Begrudging respect aside, V3.co.uk reported that cyber-criminals have begun targeting search terms related to the recent outbreak of wildfires in California. Think about this for a moment - people are interested in learning more about this major news story. They want to learn how to protect their homes, and they want to learn about how their friends and families are weathering this latest disaster. Isn't it sad that criminals choose to target these kinds of people?

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