antispyware

Kaspersky Lab, one of the world’s leading developers of secure content management solutions, has signed a partnership with Netintelligence, an internet security company. The agreement will enable Netintelligence to offer its business and home customers Kaspersky Lab’s anti-virus and firewall protection to combat the growing threat of web and email-borne viruses. Under the terms of partnership, Netintelligence will incorporate Kaspersky Lab’s products into its Netintelligence Internet Security and Netintelligence Parental Control solutions.
Netintelligence specialises in providing a comprehensive internet security service, protecting home users against viruses and spyware, web filtering and blocking, instant messenger and P2P control. The company also protects SMEs across several sectors, including education and local authorities. Its wide range of customers include Manchester City Council, Bett Homes, The Royal Mint, and CRISIS, among others.
Phil Worms, Product and Marketing Director at Netintelligence, explains the decision to partner with Kaspersky Lab: “Virus and firewall protection is extremely important for our customers and it was vital that our internet security solution protected them from current and new threats. Our main criterion was that the product set had to provide the most robust protection available against threats, and after looking at several products, we felt that the Kaspersky Lab offerings were the best available in the market.”
“We also wanted to partner with a company whose security solutions could easily integrate into our service and whose updates could be pushed out to customers through our own web-based security platform. Kaspersky Lab’s products are easily incorporated within our own product which means there aren’t any additional layers of administration for either ourselves or more importantly our customers.”
Vanessa Mitchell, OEM Manager, Kaspersky Lab UK, comments: “Our mutual knowledge of the home and SME markets makes the partnership a natural fit. We look forward to protecting Netintelligence’s customers from the latest malware threats and hacker attacks via our hourly anti-virus and anti-spyware updates.”

McAfee, Inc, a provider of intrusion prevention and risk management solutions, announced on Tuesday (15 November) the beginning of McAfee Stop Spyware Week, an initiative that is designed to raise awareness of the threats posed by spyware and other potentially unwanted programs (PUPs).
In a study conducted by the National Cyber Security Alliance, 53% of respondents said they had spyware on their computers, but when checked, 80% of computers were infected with spyware. Separate research by the Ponemon Institute showed that 42% of computer users infected with spyware had no idea how it landed on their computer.
In addition to increasing awareness of spyware and PUPs, the aim of the initiative is to educate people about the threats of PUPs and provide tips for avoiding potential infections. Computer users can visit http://www.mcafee.com/stopspyware to download a free trial to one of McAfee’s anti-spyware software programs, the company claims.

A reader wrote in Friday with an interesting observation: When he went to access his AOL.com account, he accidentally entered an extra character at the end of his password. But that didn’t stop him from entering his account. Curious, the reader tried adding multiple alphanumeric sequences after his password, and each time it logged him in successfully.
It turns out that when someone signs up for an AOL.com account, the user appears to be allowed to enter up to a 16-character password. AOL’s system, however, doesn’t read past the first eight characters.
How is this a bad set-up, security-wise? Well, let’s take a fictional AOL user named Bob Jones, who signs up with AOL using the user name BobJones. Bob — thinking himself very clever — sets his password to be BobJones$4e?0. Now, if Bob’s co-worker Alice or arch nemesis Charlie tries to guess his password, probably the first password he or she will try is Bob’s user name, since people are lazy and often use their user name as their password.
And she’d be right, in this case, because even though Bob thinks he created a pretty solid 13-character password — complete with numerals, non-standard characters, and letters — the system won’t read past the first eight characters of the password he set, which in this case is exactly the same as his user name. Bob may never be aware of this: The AOL system also will just as happily accept BobJones for his password as it will BobJones$4e?0 (or BobJones + anything else, for that matter).
AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein said the company was looking into the matter, but didn’t have any comment beyond that.
Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer BT Counterpane, called the set-up “sloppy and stupid.”
“Truncating the password at eight characters is a big deal, and there’s no excuse for any company in today’s world to be doing that,” Schneier said. “Especially because AOL has…shall we say, some less sophisticated users. Those users need all the help they can get when it comes to choosing a password, and to artificially penalize them in secret for choosing long passwords seems like a bad thing.”