Private Firewall and Comodo Anti Malware

I had previous mentioned that I had given up Bullguard (www.bullguard.com) in favor for 2 products on one of my system and so far it seems to be working good. Let me talk a little more about these 2 products.

First, its a FREE personal firewall call PrivateFirewall. Something special about this firewall is that it does a little bit more than the normal host based firewall. It does process detection, anti screen, key logging as well as system anamly. These are actually very good measures against trojans. Because it does not actually have a detection modules, Trojan may somehow be able to install, but when it tries to does anything funny, PrivateFirewall is likely to be able to catch it and terminate it because it connects back. Its not fool proof, but at least it does that part the firewall should.

Download PrivateFirewall from:
http://www.privacyware.com/personal_firewall.html

Therefore I still strongly recommend that a malware detection engine be installed. In this case, I choose AD-Aware FREE. IT does not have the Firewall, which is only in the PRO version. Ad-Aware had ben gaining some attention recently and I reckon that I should give it a chance. However, I am not sure if its because it doesn't play nice with other security products, I am unable to activate the other components besides than registry which then is pretty useless for me.

If you are not using Private Firewall, Ad-Aware may work for you:
http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php

So, my quest continues for the Anti Malware that works with PrivateFirewall and I eventually end up with Avast (for now). Avast FREE had always been one of the more popular choices because of its high accuracy and effective protection. However, it was a bit heavy on the GUI resources and I kinda avoided it until now.

So, here is the link to get Avast FREE. You will have to activate it with your email though.
http://www.avast.com/free-antivirus-download

Lets see how this deployment goes and I will post some updates again soon.

Smart TV or Smart Zombie

I am sure we all had heard of the term Smart TV. Its the "in" thing now. A TV capable of delivering very rich content from youtube to porntube video all the way to streaming your downloaded avi or mkv from your PC. Sound good, doesn't it? It does. In addition, you can even make video call with it via a TV Camera through Skype or other services. Its almost a PC. In fact, its almost "infectable" as a PC.

Yes, you know what I am driving at. Specific trojans or worms that is targeted at Smart TV. Why? Because the OS is simple and not easily upgradable. Would you upgrade your Smart TV firmware? I think maybe once in a blue moon. But you would download new apps or install some "patched" apps which makes paying for them looks stupid. These are good channels for an attacker to hit the users. And even if a jailbreak is necessary, I won't think it would take too long.

And whats the benefit of hitting a Smart TV? Its not on all the time. BUT is the server on? Probably not. Then again, some people have the TV on ALL THE TIME. If the attacker installed a trojans, its very hard to remove because I do not forsee user would pay for an Antivirus for your Smart TV, if in the first place there is one. This makes the Smart TV a perfect candidate for a "Smart" zombie.

Moreover, there are added bonus of the TV Camera. Imagine if you could stream these out, its almost like installing a spy camera in the house. I am not interested at what the camera may capture, but I am sure many other noisy people will be. I do not suppose there is a firewall to block the Smart TV from sending streams to "spycam.badsite.com". Well, you heard me. There will probably not be a market for security software if users needs to pay a lot of it.

Well, at the point of time of this writing, there is still no KNOWN trojans for Smart TV. But who knows, there may already be some in work or even deployed. Thinking of getting a Smart TV. Be Smart! Get a dumb TV!

P.S. I am not against Smart TV, but I just want to express my views on potential danger and security risks involved in rolling out such technology without a good mechanism for defense. This is the reason why the bad guys always wins.

A brief history of XCP and Sony / BMG DRM Rootkit

I found an article which details the whole incident from the start:

http://www.boycott-riaa.com/article/20244

That turns out to be a pretty good read and therefore I am recommending you go take a look and understand what the big fuss it was all about and why we should not allow companies like Sony install rootkit on our PC.

Most classic quote:

"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" Sony BMG's Hesse

8 Steps to remove a generic malware

Here is a link to an article which shows 8 basic steps on the removal of a malware.
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic58138.html

I guess it is good to have it printed out in case of a rainy day.

Analyzing Malwares Using Microsoft Tools

This article is very technical, but nevertheless shows that even with simple (ok, but not so simple) and free tools from Microsoft, we can begin to do some malware analysis on our own.

http://community.websense.com/blogs/securitylabs/archive/2010/04/29/analyzing-malwares-using-microsoft-tools.aspx

Beware, the Windbg package includes the WDK (which had just been updated and is of Apr 2010 instead of March 2009 as mentioned in the article) is quite big (700MB).