QNAP Systems, Inc. today announced the release of McAfee Antivirus for Turbo NAS systems. Available now with a limited-time special offer, QNAP users can protect their data using a world-leading antivirus solution that stays up-to-date with the latest virus definitions and can also heal infected files.

The threat of a virus infecting and corrupting data is a real and all too often harsh reality for both businesses and home users alike. With a subscription to McAfee Antivirus, QNAP users can ensure their data stays protected from viruses, heal currently-infected files and receive the latest definitions to combat present & future virus threats.

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday announced the opening of the Microsoft Cybercrime Center, a center of excellence for advancing the global fight against cybercrime. The Cybercrime Center combines Microsoft's legal and technical expertise as well as cutting-edge tools and technology with cross-industry expertise, marking a new era in effectively fighting crime on the Internet.

Each year, cybercrime takes a personal and financial toll on millions of consumers around the globe. The Cybercrime Center will tackle online crimes, including those associated with malware, botnets, intellectual property theft and technology-facilitated child exploitation. The work done at the Cybercrime Center will help ensure that people worldwide can use their computing devices and services with confidence.

An FTP server in Taiwan that could be publicly accessed, leaked the source code of AMI Aptio UEFI BIOS, including AMI's unique UEFI signing test key. The utterly irresponsible act of holding such sensitive data on public FTPs is suspected to be committed by motherboard vendor Jetway. In doing so, the company may have compromised security of every motherboard (across vendors) running AMI Aptio UEFI BIOS. Most socket LGA1155 and FM2 motherboards, and some socket AM3+ motherboards run AMI Aptio.

Among the leaked bits of software include the source code of AMI BIOS, Aptio, and AMI's UEFI test signing key, which is used by all its clients to sign their BIOS updates. Signing ensures that BIOS updating software verifies the update is genuine, and coming from the motherboard manufacturer. With this key out, malware developers can develop malicious BIOS updates, hack motherboard vendors' customer support websites, and replace legitimate BIOS updates with their malicious ones. Control over the system BIOS could then give hackers access to most ring-0 OS functions.

Kaspersky Lab's CEO and co-founder, Eugene Kaspersky, has been voted Technology Hero of the Year in the third annual V3 technology awards. This is considered a massive achievement due to the award being presented to no other than the late Apple CEO, Steve Jobs in 2011.
Voted for by V3 readers, this prestigious award recognises Eugene's huge impact on the security industry over the past 15 years since Kaspersky Lab was founded. From Flame to Madi, inspiring leader Eugene has been at the fore-front of all of the company's ground-breaking malware discoveries and offered his expert advice to businesses and consumers alike.

"Our malware discoveries are dedicated to making the online world a safer place, so it's great to see the appreciation by winning this award", explains Eugene Kaspersky. "Being recognised as Technology Hero of the Year is an amazing achievement for not just myself, but Kaspersky Lab as a company due to the time and commitment spent on fighting cybercrime both before it occurs and during."

Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of security and threat management solutions, today announced a partnership with Facebook, with the goal of enhancing the security of social networking both online and offline. Kaspersky Lab is now supplying Facebook with up-to-the-minute data about the latest malicious software threats worldwide, which will be used to protect Facebook users from inadvertently visiting malicious web pages.

People are more likely to click on a link shared by a friend, and this inherent trust is something cyber-criminals prey upon. Malicious URLs can automatically share themselves with a victim's personal contacts without the user's knowledge, making the links appear legitimate. Now, when Facebook users share or click a link shared by their friends, the link will instantly be compared against Kaspersky Lab's database of malicious web pages. If the link matches Facebook's list of known 'bad' URLs - which are supplied to Facebook by Kaspersky Lab and other security vendors - the user will be immediately notified and blocked from visiting the web page. This not only prevents the user's personal information and computer from being put at risk, but stops the malicious links from spreading further.

Today Kaspersky Lab announced the discovery of miniFlame, a small and highly flexible malicious program designed to steal data and control infected systems during targeted cyber espionage operations.

miniFlame, also known as SPE, was found by Kaspersky Lab's experts in July 2012, and was originally identified as a Flame module. However, in September 2012, Kaspersky Lab's research team conducted an in-depth analysis of Flame's command & control servers (C&C) and from the analysis found that the miniFlame module was actually an interoperable tool that could be used as an independent malicious program, or concurrently as plug-in for both the Flame and Gauss malware.

Analysis of miniFlame showed there were several versions created between 2010 and 2011, with some variants still being active in the wild. The analysis also revealed new evidence of the cooperation between the creators of Flame and Gauss, as both malicious programs can use miniFlame as a "plug-in" for their operations.

Iomega, an EMC company and a global leader in data protection, today announced the addition of McAfee VirusScan Enterprise to all Iomega StorCenter PX series network storage products.

The combination of McAfee running natively on the Iomega PX series network storage products represents an industry first: an enterprise-class endpoint protection product running natively on desktop and rackmount network storage products designed specifically for small and medium businesses, remote office/branch office installations, and distributed enterprises.

Today's IT managers face a range of challenges from complex business processes to sophisticated security threats. Additionally, a number of industries such as retail, healthcare and industrial are turning to technology to develop innovative solutions to solve the unique challenges facing them in an increasingly connected world. To address these challenges, Intel Corporation has announced the availability of its 3rd Generation Intel Core vPro processor-based platforms for business and intelligent systems.

The enhancements to the Intel Core vPro processor platform provide a more secure platform for business computing and drive the next wave of innovation in intelligent systems. The Intel Core vPro processor-based platforms address the realities of today's business climate, where data integrity and organizational efficiency create a competitive advantage. New capabilities embed security at every layer, including the silicon, without compromising performance. Software innovation allows IT managers to set up and configure systems within minutes to quickly implement compelling solutions. Additionally, the enhanced graphics and secure manageability help accelerate the transition and growth in intelligent systems for the retail, industrial, and healthcare industries.

Weeks after security mogul Eugene Kaspersky opined that Apple is "10 years behind Microsoft on security," Kaspersky Lab revealed that it is collaborating with Apple to investigate security concerns (read: vulnerabilities) of its operating systems, and improve its security. Kaspersky Lab CTO Nikolai Grebennikov in an interview with Computing.co.uk was quoted saying "Apple recently invited us to improve its security."

Kaspersky Lab maintains that Apple's software is extremely vulnerable, going as far as to claim that Apple doesn't pay enough attention to security. "Our first investigations show Apple doesn't pay enough attention to security. For example, Oracle closed a vulnerability in Java, which was a target for a major botnet several months ago," said Grebennikov. Apple's decision to handle updates of Java runtime environment for OS X by itself, breaking away from Oracle's update cycle, particularly drew flack from Grebennikov. "Apple blocked Oracle from updating Java on Mac OS, and they perform all the udpates themselves. They only released the patch a few weeks ago - two or three months after the Oracle patch. That's far too long," he said. Kaspersky isn't too optimistic about the infinitely more popular iOS platform, either. "Our experience tells us that in the near future, perhaps in a year or so, we will see the first malware targeting iOS," it commented.

VirusScan, otherwise known as McAfee Antivirus is the best safeguard measure to minimize and prevent virus attacks. With Thecus VirusScan module, users can rest assure that their vital data is protected with advanced features to eliminate possible threats. Thecus NAS now comes with free McAfee VirusScan module for maximum data security.

McAfee is a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation and is the world's largest dedicated security company, offering industry-leading, award-winning product which is a reason why Thecus decided to partner with them.

Symantec Corp. today announced the findings of its Internet Security Threat Report, Volume 17, which shows that while the number of vulnerabilities decreased by 20 percent, the number of malicious attacks continued to skyrocket by 81 percent. In addition, the report highlights that advanced targeted attacks are spreading to organizations of all sizes and variety of personnel, data breaches are increasing, and that attackers are focusing on mobile threats.

Malicious Attacks Continue to Grow Rapidly

Symantec blocked more than 5.5 billion malicious attacks in 2011, an increase of 81 percent over the previous year. In addition, the number of unique malware variants increased to 403 million and the number of Web attacks blocked per day increased by 36 percent.

A Flashback trojan that affected over 600,000 OS X machines with relative ease, earlier this month, exposed gaping holes in the OS X software architecture and got industry experts discussing how competent Apple is at dealing with the threat of malware, on its end. Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and co-founder of security company Kaspersky Lab, believes that Apple is "10 years behind Microsoft in terms of security," and the ease with which scores of OS X machines could be compromised by malware in the recent times formed the basis of his assertion.

"For many years I've been saying that from a security point of view there is no big difference between Mac and Windows. It's always been possible to develop Mac malware, but this one was a bit different. For example it was asking questions about being installed on the system and, using vulnerabilities, it was able to get to the user mode without any alarms," Kaspersky commented. Increase in malware and cybercrime against OS X machines, according to him are "just a question of time and market share. Cyber criminals have now recognised that Mac is an interesting area. Now we have more, it's not just Flashback or Flashfake. Welcome to Microsoft's world, Mac. It's full of malware."

Among its usual chunk of updates for Windows, Office, and other products covered by Microsoft Update, Redmond released a key security update for the Remote Desktop Protocol (2671387), and asked all users to apply it as soon as possible. It asked system administrators to give the patch "special priority," given the severity of the security hole. The security hole with RDP spans across all versions of Windows, across all machine architectures. The security hole allows hackers to gain access to RDP hosts and clients. Microsoft gives it 30 days before hackers can develop malware that can exploit the security hole. Find out more about the security hole, and its patch here.

Security software maker Symantec confirmed to the press that the group of hackers that obtained source code of its pcAnywhere software were holding it to ransom. The group claims to be linked to Anonymous. The group allegedly demanded US $50,000 from Symantec in return for destroying the source code it stole, on failing to pay it, the group threatened it would leak the source code to the public, which would expose the software to malware writers and competitors.

Symantec has apparently been in negotiations with the hacker group over preventing the leak, it even agreed to pay the group its "ransom", provided it could do so in monthly installments. The group declined, and the negotiations fell through. A transcript of this email conversation was posted on Pastebin (can be accessed here). The hackers claimed to have posted the source code of pcAnywhere (in a 2.3 GB RAR archive), on a popular bit-torrent site. In our opinion, extorting money is very un-Anonymous. Anonymous, being the self-proclaimed hacktivist group that it is, would post the source code "just for the lulz", without even getting into negotiations with Symantec.

Yes, that's right, SOPA might have been set back for now, but the vested interests from the big media corporations (music/movies/news etc) that want it implemented unsurprisingly aren't sitting idle and are pushing for ever more draconian measures aka 'SOPA Plus'. A digital music report (PDF) asks for everything that was in the original SOPA and then some, with a wishlist of seven 'fixes':

Anno 2070's Draconian DRM: Guru3D's Graphics Card Review Killed Off (UPDATED)

Hilbert Hagedoorn of well-known PC tech review site guru3d.com recently bought a copy of Ubisoft's Anno 2070 and wanted to use it in one of his graphics card reviews. However, he became badly unstuck. This game comes on the Steam platform and the store page states: "3rd-party DRM: Solidshield Tages SAS 3 machine activation limit". Unfortunately for Guru3D, they found out exactly what this means, which resulted in just one performance graph, an aborted review, an unplayable game - and bad publicity for Ubisoft once again. They have published an article about their experience, pledging not to use their titles again because of this DRM.

McAfee today unveiled its 2012 Threat Predictions report, outlining the top threats that McAfee foresees for the coming year. The list indicates that emerging threats from 2011 are on track to become the major players for cyberactivity in 2012, including mobile banking, "legal" spam and virtual currency. McAfee Labs also predicts that attacks involving political motivation or notoriety will also make headlines, including high-profile industrial attacks, cyberwarfare demonstrations and hacktivist attacks targeting public figures.

"Many of the threats that will become prominent in 2012 have already been looming under the radar in 2011," said Vincent Weafer, senior vice president of McAfee Labs. "Over the past year, the general public has become more aware of some of these risks, such as threats to critical infrastructure or the impact of hacktivism as they gain international media attention. In the meantime, we continue to see cybercriminals improving their toolkits and malware and are ready to make a significant impact in 2012."

Welcome to the TechPowerUp 2011 PC technology Christmas special. We hope that you will enjoy reading it while tucking into your turkey, Christmas presents and a little too much wine... In this article, we go through the technology of 2011 that has had the most significance, the most impact and was generally the most talked about. It's not necessarily the best tech of 2011 which is the most significant though, since lemons can be just as significant as the ground-breakers in how they fail to deliver - and the backlash that goes with it.

January: Intel Sandy Bridge i5 & i7

Released on January 9th, the new Intel Core i5 & i7 processors were based on Intel's second generation Core architecture built on a 32 nm production process (HEXUS review). They included an IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) physically on the same piece of silicon along with HyperThreading. These new dual and quad core processors soundly beat all previous generations of Intel processors in terms of processing performance, heat, power use, features and left AMD in the dust. Therefore, Intel badly needed some competition from AMD and unless you have been living under a rock, you will know how that turned out in October with the launch of Bulldozer. Sandy Bridge was a sound win and is generally considered to be the only architecture worth considering at this point. The i5-2500K is currently at the sweet spot of price/performance. It comes at a stock speed of 3.3 GHz, but typically overclocks to an amazing 4.5 - 5 GHz with a decent air cooler and without too much difficulty in getting there. Models in the budget i3 range were released at various times later. See this Wikipedia article for details.

Windows 8 implements a radical new user interface called Metro for desktop PC's, which has so far received a mixed reception. However, there's many other changes under the hood and one of those is how password security is handled, which we look at here. It's a fact of life, that in today's modern world, we have to remember a plethora of passwords and PIN's, which can be daunting. This leads to security issues as users end up writing down passwords and/or create very insecure ones which can be easily guessed. Windows 8 aims to uphold strong password security, while at the same time, easing the burden on the user. Also, passwords can be obtained in various ways by miscreants, such as phishing, keylogging, guessing, and cracking. Windows addresses each of these problems in three main ways:

We have brought you the potential perils of the upcoming UEFI Forum-implemented - www.uefi.org - Windows 8 secure boot feature here, here and here. However, it appears that it may not be so 'secure' after all, since there appears to be a surefire way to circumvent it, at least for the moment, while it's in development.

Softpedia has scored an exclusive interview with security researcher Peter Kleissner, who has created various Windows (XP, Server 2003 etc) "bootkits", which allow OS infection at the highest privilege level, giving unrestricted access to the whole of the PC. His latest one, called Stoned Lite, shows how the Windows 8 secure boot process, still in development, can be subverted, as it stands. He is planning to release details of how the code works at the upcoming International Malware Conference (MalCon) - malcon.org - that will take place in India on November 25th. It appears that the real vulnerability exists in the legacy BIOS boot procedure, not in Microsoft's implementation of secure boot, as Kleissner said:

The problem with the legacy startup is that no one verifies the MBR, which makes it the vulnerable point. With UEFI and secure boot, all the boot applications and drivers have to be signed (otherwise they won't be loaded). You can compare it to TPM, although Arie van der Hoeven from Microsoft announced that the secure boot feature is mandatory for OEMs who want to be UEFI certified. It is a good message that security is not an option.

Valve, a company that operates solely online, takes its security pretty seriously and has a good reputation in this area. However, at the time of writing, its Steam forums are down, having suffered a hack attack earlier today. Visit the forums now and you see a message saying "The Steam Forums are temporarily offline for maintenance. Your patience is appreciated." This attack was apparently done by hackers who want to offer free game cheats (but one should be wary of stealthy malware payloads) since before the forums were taken down, they had planted this message:

Ever wanted to dominate the servers you play on with guaranteed results, but you were too afraid to cheat because of ban risks?

The rest of the message then recommends a website where one can obtain all sorts of illegal game cheats, hack tools and porn. Some Steam forum users even received an email with this text, such as this NeoGAF user. There's no indication that any user's account information has been compromised. However, if you haven't yet set up Steam Guard, now is a good time to do so, along with changing your password when the forums come back online. Also, be sure to use different a password for every login. Of course, many other gaming forums have been hacked in the past and just this year saw many hacks against such big names as Nintendo, Sega, BioWare, Epic Games and of course Sony, which was hacked many times over in protest at their business practices, such as removing the OtherOS feature from their PS3 console.

Hot on the heels of our previous story of Apple Macs falling prey to a DDoS trojan, we now have another Mac trojan come on the market, as explained by Sophos. Yes, the Apple platform must indeed be becoming more popular to get this one. It's an unfortunate fact of life that the popularity of any computing platform, including smartphones, can be judged by the number of criminals who will attack it. This little nasty, called OSX/Miner-D or 'DevilRobber', hijacks Mac OS X to perform various tricks, which include minting Bitcoins (the virtual and now virtually worthless currency) stealing usernames and passwords (of course) taking screenshots and stealing the victim's Bitcoin wallet while it's at it, if there is one. And for good measure:

it runs a script that copies information to a file called dump.txt regarding truecrypt data, Vidalia (TOR plugin for Firefox), your Safari browsing history, and .bash_history.

So, now the criminals also know about all the sites one has visited, eroding user privacy even more. It looks like this malware has covered all the bases, but wait, there's more.

For years Apple Mac users have felt smug that their computers didn't need any security software installed, unlike their poor Windows counterparts which were always coming down with a cold. This they believed is because their beloved operating system is inherently more secure than leaky old Windows (which it used to be). This smug feeling has been especially strong over the last decade, since the release of Mac OS X in 2001, as it's based on Unix which has always had security baked into it. They therefore felt safe from the multitude of viruses, keyloggers, trojans and various other nasties that the bad guys like to infect operating systems with. However, there have been successful attacks in the past on every Apple Mac operating system since the first one in 1984, just nowhere near the number of attacks as on Windows. Of course, what Windows users, Linux users and other OS users have also been saying for years is that Apple's operating systems simply weren't popular enough to bother with and aren't particularly secure. After all, the hackers do this for fun and financial profit, so why aim for a little teeny tiny target, when you can aim for a big, fat one like Windows?

Yes, that's right the maker of notoriously vulnerable software is now blaming you, the user, should you get a virus, trojan or other malware infection on your Windows computer. However, it does look like they have some justification for saying this. For those with long attention spans, Microsoft have just released their 168 page Microsoft Security Intelligence Report 6MB PDF, with the stated aim of providing:

An in-depth perspective on software vulnerabilities and exploits, malicious code threats, and potentially unwanted software in the first half of 2011

The first thing to note about the report is that it is limited to its Malicious Software Removal Tool and Microsoft's other anti-malware products. Zero-day attacks that it can't detect are not included in the findings. So, surely it can't all be the user's fault then? It also means that the security angles from third party security vendors such as Kaspersky, Norton and McAfee aren't represented here.

Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of Flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules, today announced the USB 3.0 DataGuardian, a password protected USB 3.0 flash drive that makes data security easy and affordable.

By now almost everyone is familiar with USB flash drives. They are incredibly useful and have become an indispensible part of our computing environments. We all know that we should be using a secure solution, but the fact is security solutions are expensive, cumbersome and limit the usefulness of a flash drive. That is, until now.