McAfee LiveSafe is the best product in McAfee's sizable security portfolio. Its suite offers protection for an unlimited number of Windows PCs, Macs and Android and iOS devices, along with a Web dashboard. There's 1TB of cloud-based storage as well. The whole thing is available for $60 per year.Windows
McAfee gives you a solid complement of protection tools for your PC that includes virus and spyware protection, Web and email protection, and parental controls. Also included is a suite of not overly impressive tune-up tools.
The interface is straightforward, with big icons representing each of its modules. I found the design to be clear and simple, letting me easily drill down to customize any feature. Modules include Virus and Spyware Protection, Web and Email Protection, Data Protection, PC and Home Network Tools, and Parental Controls. There are also icons that you can click to update the software or see the status of your subscription.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The leaked files from surveillance software maker Hacking Team have proven to be a great resource for cyberespionage groups, which have used at least two Flash Player exploits from the company’s arsenal.Last Tuesday, security researchers from security firm FireEye detected targeted attacks against organizations in Japan, with the attackers using an exploit for CVE-2015-5122, a Flash Player vulnerability patched by Adobe Systems that same day.The vulnerability was publicly known before that date because an exploit for it was found in the 400GB data cache recently leaked by a hacker from Milan-based Hacking Team.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tracking devices is nothing new. In the auto industry, multiple vendors compete to convince drivers to install the devices in their cars, promising that if it gets stolen, the cops will know right where to find it. In law enforcement, criminals on probation sometimes are required to wear an ankle bracelet that does the same thing – tells authorities exactly where they are.
It is also possible to do that with data. Digital watermarking can track where it is being viewed or downloaded, and also identify the IP address and the type of device doing it. It is not in widespread use, according to experts, and could in some cases have privacy implications, but its advocates say while it doesn’t prevent a data breach, it can let an organization that has been breached know about it almost immediately, instead of months later.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S2 is thinnest and lightest yetSamsung said Monday that its new Android tablets go on sale next month and the lighter, trimmed down products will offer consumers an alternative to Apple’s iPad Air 2. There are 9.7-inch and 8-inch models with a 2048 by 1536 pixel Super AMOLED screen; both come with a fingerprint scanner, along with Samsung’s eight-core chip, which has two quad-core processors, one running at 1.9GHz, the other at 1.3 GHz.Some drones deliver medicine, others interfere with firefightersTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Proficio ProSOC ExpressKey features: ProSOC Express provides SMBs with 24x7 enterprise-class security monitoring and alerting services. Offered as a highly affordable SaaS subscription service, it includes the same advanced SIEM technology and 24x7 expert monitoring that Proficio provides to its enterprise customers. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I once co-wrote a book on enterprise email where I likened email encryption to a “sucking chest wound.” That was in 1997, when you had to do all the encryption key management on your own, a daunting task to say the least.
While things have improved considerably since then, encrypting messages is not as simple as it could be, and requires careful study if you want to have truly private communications that can’t be viewed by your competitors – or your government.
In the past, recipients of encrypted emails had to share the same system as the sender, and many email clients were difficult to configure. Today, many products have a “zero knowledge encryption” feature, which means you can send an encrypted message to someone who isn’t on your chosen encryption service. Just provide them a passphrase to decrypt their message and to compose a reply to you, or in some cases they can read the message by just authenticating themselves. After this first communication, your recipient is able to exchange encrypted messages with you quite easily.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Email encryptionRecipients of encrypted emails once had to share the same system as the sender. Today, products have a “zero knowledge encryption” feature, which means you can send an encrypted message to someone who isn’t on your chosen encryption service. Today’s products make sending and receiving messages easier, with advances like an Outlook or browser plug-in that gives you nearly one-button encryption. And the products we reviewed have features like setting expiration dates, being able to revoke unread messages or prevent them from being forwarded. (Read the full review.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Email encryptionRecipients of encrypted emails once had to share the same system as the sender. Today, products have a “zero knowledge encryption” feature, which means you can send an encrypted message to someone who isn’t on your chosen encryption service. Today’s products make sending and receiving messages easier, with advances like an Outlook or browser plug-in that gives you nearly one-button encryption. And the products we reviewed have features like setting expiration dates, being able to revoke unread messages or prevent them from being forwarded. (Read the full review.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After attending IDEX 2015 (International Defense Exhibition), Boeing subsidiary Insitu become interested in using its surveillance drones to deliver Hacking Team malware for even more surveillance.In April, an Insitu mechanical engineer intern sent an email to the Hacking Team which stated:
We see potential in integrating your Wi-Fi hacking capability into an airborne system and would be interested in starting a conversation with one of your engineers to go over, in more depth, the payload capabilities including the detailed size, weight, and power specs of your Galileo System.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Next-gen endpoint protection vendor CrowdStrike has landed $100 million in new investments to beef up sales and engineering and continue its push to make anti-virus software obsolete.The company will hire at least another 70 people to boost its engineering staff as well as expand its operations outside North America. The company has about 210 employees now, says CEO George Kurtz.+ ALSO ON NETWORKWORLD: Hottest network and computing startups of 2015 +The new funding pushes total investment in the company to $156 million and makes it the first security company that Google Capital has invested in. Also participating in this C Round of funding is Rackspace, Accel Partners and Warburg Pincus.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A hack targeting UCLA Health’s computer network may have exposed personal and medical data on 4.5 million people.The attack tapped into parts of the system where sensitive details like names, birth dates and health plan identification numbers are kept, though there’s no evidence yet that the information was “actually accessed or acquired,” UCLA Health said Friday.UCLA Health, which operates four hospitals in the Los Angeles area, noticed strange activity on its network in October. UCLA Health and the FBI looked into the incident and initially believed attackers had not accessed network servers that stored personal data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Flash Player update released Tuesday not only fixed two vulnerabilities that were being targeted by attackers, but added additional protections that will make entire classes of security flaws much harder to exploit in the future.There were three low-level defenses added in Flash Player 18.0.0.209, two of which block a technique that has been used by many Flash exploits since 2013.The technique involves corrupting the length of an ActionScript Vector buffer object so that malicious code can be placed at predictable locations in memory and executed. ActionScript is the programming language in which Flash applications are written.This method was used by at least two of the Flash Player exploits found among the files leaked from Italian surveillance software maker Hacking Team, as well as in two other flash zero-day exploits used by cyberespionage groups this year, researchers from Google said in a blog post Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google reports strong earnings, but slowing growthGoogle’s second quarter income of $3.93 billion reported Thursday was up 17 percent year-on-year, but its sales of $17.73 billion represented an 11 percent growth rate, the smallest revenue increase reported by the company since 2012. Google is struggling to grow its ad revenue on mobile devices: ads in mobile search results are smaller, and can yield fewer interactions from users, driving down their price.Apple, Samsung may join in launch of embedded SIM cardsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Spam fell to less than 50 percent of all email in June, the lowest in a decade, Symantec said Thursday in its latest Intelligence Report.The levels of spam have been slowly falling since 2010 for multiple reasons. Network providers are more tuned into the problem and take action faster when there are issues on their services.Also, unlike six or seven years ago, sending billions of messages per day from massive botnets isn’t as feasible anymore.Law enforcement, along with companies including Microsoft, have aggressively gone after some of the largest botnets over the last few years and worked to technically shut them down. Although some botnet operators have been able in some instances to regain control, the increased attention makes it more difficult for them to work.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Data stolen from Hacking Team continues to yield information about the company’s infiltration techniques. The latest find is a fake Android news app, which was used to install its flagship surveillance tool.The app is called “BeNews,” the same name as a long-shuttered news website, wrote Wish Wu, mobile threat response engineer, on Trend Micro’s blog.Inside the app is a backdoor that appears to have been used to load the Android version of Hacking Team’s Remote Control System (RCS), also known as Galileo, a data-collecting tool the company sold to law enforcement and security agencies worldwide.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What matters most in improving employee engagement levels--defined as the sense of purpose and commitment employees feel toward their employer and its mission— is valuing employees, that is, an authentic focus on their performance, career development, and inclusion and involvement in decisions affecting their work. The key is identifying what practices to implement and how to implement them.+GAO: Early look at fed’s “Einstein 3” security weapon finds challenges+Those thoughts were but a few found in a report on employee engagement from the watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office this week which took a look at how private- and public-sector organizations increased levels of engagement to see what can lead to better organizational performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier this year, I wrote a post discussing why security needs to be adaptive. The high-profile breaches of big-name firms like Target and Bank of America, not to mention the Office of Personnel Management, have acted as a wake-up call to businesses. No matter how much money and how many people are thrown at securing the perimeter, it will not stop 100% of malicious traffic from penetrating the enterprise.Solving the security challenge continues to confound IT professionals as well. In the 2015 Network Purchase Intention Study, run jointly by ZK Research and Tech Target, we asked over 1,000 respondents globally, "What are your company’s top 3 priorities for next 12 months?" To no surprise, security came back as the No. 1 response. Another question we asked was, "What IT products are taking up more time than in previous years?" Again, security was overwhelmingly the No. 1 response. So security is a top initiative for IT, but it’s taking more and more time. Something has to change if the acceleration of breaches the industry has seen over the past few years is going to reverse course (disclosure: I am an employee of ZK Research).To read this article Continue reading
Cybercriminals are casting increasingly wider nets in their search for new point-of-sale systems to infect. This appears to be the case with a new memory scraping malware program called GamaPoS that’s distributed by a large botnet known as Andromeda.GamaPoS was recently discovered by security researchers from antivirus vendor Trend Micro, who found systems infected with it inside organizations from 13 U.S. states and Vancouver, Canada.The program is written in Microsoft’s .NET, which is unusual for RAM scraping malware. These type of threats monitor the memory of point-of-sale systems for payment card data and steal it while it’s being passed from the physical card readers to the commerce applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s an old saying in the security community: Attacks always get better. The latest case where that holds true is for the aging RC4 cipher that’s still widely used to encrypt communications on the Internet.Researchers Mathy Vanhoef and Frank Piessens from the University of Leuven in Belgium devised a new attack method that can recover authentication cookies and other sensitive information from Web connections encrypted with RC4.The RC4 (Rivest Cipher 4) algorithm was designed in 1987 by renowned cryptographer Ron Rivest and remained a trade secret until 1994, when it was leaked on the Internet. Since then it has been implemented in a number of popular protocols, including SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and its successor, TLS (Transport Layer Security); the WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) wireless security standards; Microsoft’s RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and MPPE (Microsoft Point-to-Point Encryption), BitTorrent and others.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here