Category: Security

Antivirus Software is a Potential Preventative Measure, Not a Cure

This might polarise the audience a bit but I just wanted to expand on my thoughts in this earlier article. In that article, I noted the only 100% effective solution to cure an infected computer is to format and reinstall or restore from a known good backup. Today, I tried and tried unsuccessfully to eradicate a trojan from …

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Automatic Updates Coming in Internet Explorer

Here’s something to keep in mind when using Internet Explorer on Windows XP, Vista and 7. For a while now, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome have possessed auto-update capabilities (Firefox being more explicit about it while Chrome silently updates itself in the background and applies the changes when it is restarted with nary a peep). …

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Microsoft Security Essential Beta – Testing Underway

Just a short update tonight. I’ve installed the recent beta of the upcoming version of Microsoft Security Essentials (Version 4.0.1111.0) to see how it performs and how different it is to prior versions. The upgrade only took a minute and I am setting it off on a scan to assess its speed. No major red …

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Upcoming Beta of Microsoft Security Essentials

Looks like Microsoft are prepping a new major release of the popular Security Essentials package by enlisting a stack of beta testers prior to the final version going out. Amongst existing features, it’s expected that new feature will include automatic malware removal (removing the requirement for user interaction) plus enhanced performance and protection capabilities. At …

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Enable TLS 1.1 on Windows 7

Here’s another quick tip for the security conscious people out there. Windows 7 supports a security protocol called TLS (Transport Layer Security) which superseded SSL as the security protocol of choice. Specifically, Windows 7 supports up to TLS 1.1 but the support for this version is disabled by default which forces compatibility back down to …

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AVG for Windows Phone 7 is a Farce

There’s not much in the way of security software on Windows Phone 7 partially because the operating system already does a good job sandboxing third party app. However, AVG released a scanner this week for Windows Phone 7 which sought to fill a perceived gap in virus security for the platform. Unfortunately, it seems like …

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Sometimes Secret Questions Aren’t So Secret

When you are signing up for an account on a website or a new service you are prompted for a whole stack of information which may include items such as: your name, e-mail address, password, date of birth, postal address information, gender. In additional to the above, you may be asked to select a secret …

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Change Your PSN Account Details

PlayStation Account Management

Whilst this might seem a bit obvious it can’t hurt to make this suggestion. A lot of people use the same username and password combinations across a bunch of websites and even for their personal e-mail (when a username has to be in the form of an e-mail address). Of course, this makes it easier …

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Network Traffic Anomaly Detected in LastPass Service

For those that don’t know, LastPass is a fantastic free service that takes care of your password management for websites plus other neat things such as automatic form filling and random password generation. I’ve used this for a while myself across multiple computers (under Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome), my iPad and Samsung Galaxy S …

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Microsoft Releases a New Portable Antivirus

Microsoft Safety Scanner - Scan Results Screen

Sometimes it can be hard getting an antivirus to install on an infected machine especially when malware is making it difficult to use an internet connection. I have covered other tools such as MalwareBytes in the past but I thought a new tool released by Microsoft was worth a mention. The Microsoft Safety Scanner is …

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