A to Z of online piracy

LONDON, England (CNN) -- If mention of The Pirate Bay conjures up images of parrots, peg legs and planks, or geeky jargon like BitTorrent and jailbreak leaves you all at sea, this handy A-Z will help you navigate the choppy waters of the online piracy debate.

"X-Men Origins: Wolverine," starring Hugh Jackman, was downloaded over a million times after being leaked in early April.

The Screening Room's indispensable lexicon of online piracy will teach you cracking from key generators: You'll never again be caught out wondering how "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" fits into warez.

A is for anti-piracy
Efforts to prevent the illegal transfer and use of copyrighted material -- often spearheaded by corporate associations like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) -- using a variety of digital rights management (DRM) tools like encryption, product keys and serial numbers. Technologically often a step or two behind the pirates, the entertainment industry will sue for breach of copyright.

B is for Bill Gates
As early as 1976, Gates wrote an open letter saying that software piracy could be a problem. Ironically, he has since said that Microsoft actually benefited from piracy in China, where over 90 percent of computers use Windows, most copies of which are pirated. The widespread use of Microsoft's operating system has enabled the software giant to gain pole position in the fast-growing market.

C is for cracking
Modifying software to remove copy protection -- one of the technologies companies use to prevent unauthorized reproduction of media -- to enable the illegal duplication and proliferation of pirated material on disks and online. Mostly done by hackers, not usually for money but to gain respect within the hacker community.

D is for digital rights management (DRM)
Access-control technologies used by manufacturers. Most pirating technology is created to circumvent various types of DRM in order to share copyrighted material online. Apple rid its iTunes library of DRM in early April, but is charging users 30 cents per song to upgrade to DRM-free tracks.

E is for encryption
Originally used by militaries to protect secret message transmissions, encryption allows a user to transform and "lock" information that, upon transfer, can only be opened by a person who has the right "key." Encryption software is one of many anti-piracy measures designed to prevent the spread of copying and transferring copyrighted material.

F is for Free Culture movement
Led by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, the movement believes restrictive copyright laws are strangling humanity's creativity. Under Lessig's "Creative Commons" organization, the movement is advocating for the free copying and modification of creative works -- and rejecting what they perceive to be the culturally oppressive "permission culture" of copyright and intellectual property.

G is for Global Software Piracy
This report by the Business Software Alliance suggested that 35 percent of software installed on PCs worldwide in 2006 was pirated.

H is for hackers
Hackers "wiped," or erased, all the data from the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Web site in 2008. The incident, which exposed serious flaws in the RIAA's web security, was an embarrassment for the group, which represents the recording industry of the United States.

I is for International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)

According to the IFPI's 2008 Digital Music Report, up to 80 percent of data traffic via Internet service providers (ISPs) is involved in the illegal transfer of pirated material.

J is for jailbreak
Mostly commonly associated with the iPhone, it is the practice of downloading illicit software designed to bypass digital rights management, allowing people to upload pirated versions of official iPhone applications for free and use them on their phones.

K is for key generators
Small programs found on pirate sites that allow users to crack open key-locked software like Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop by generating valid serial numbers for pirated copies of software that would otherwise only be included with legitimately purchased copies.

L is for Limewire
One of the oldest and most popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing clients, Limewire is a free program used to search for and download pirated content. The program has been accused of having massive security gaps and an abundance of "malware" files, which contain computer viruses that infect users' computers upon completion of a download.

M is for Metallica
The first major band to sue for online music piracy in 2000, Metallica sued file-sharing service, Napster and three U.S. universities for enabling illegal downloading of copyrighted content. The case, which saw the rock group harshly criticized by many of its fans, was eventually settled out of court when Napster agreed to block illegal downloads of the band's songs.

N is for Napster
Online music-sharing service created by a college student in Boston in 1999, which spearheaded the widespread illegal copying and transferring of MP3 music files. A judge shut down the service in 2001. Napster has since relaunched as a legitimate monthly subscription music site.

O is for organized crime
International recording industry organization, IFPI and Interpol say there are links between online piracy and organized crime and terrorism, citing examples from South America to South Africa and Eastern Europe to East Asia.

P is for P2P
More than 20 times as much music is exchanged on peer-to-peer networks as is legally purchased, the Economist magazine wrote in 2008. BitTorrent is a growing P2P technology that allows the rapid downloading of large, multi-gigabyte files.

Q is for quality
According to a survey by the auditor Ernst and Young in India, 66 percent of people believe pirated content is of an inferior quality to the original, but 89 percent say they've used pirated music or films anyway.

R is for R4 card
A $30 Nintendo DS cartridge that can be loaded with hundreds of free, pirated Nintendo games, the R4 card is cheaper than the store price of many single authentic games.

S is for Sweden
Prosecutors in the country filed suit against The Pirate Bay Web site earlier this year for "promoting other people's infringement of copyright laws." Dubbed the "Internet piracy trial of the decade" by UK newspaper The Times, the verdict against the site will have massive implications for the future of online file-sharing, but The Pirate Bay's founders plan to appeal and have previously said that the site will stay up and running.

T is for The Pirate Bay
A very popular file-sharing Web site primarily used as a linking site to find and download pirated movies, music, video games, applications and more. It tracks BitTorrents -- file sharing protocols that enable big, fast file transfers. The Pirate Bay's founders have constantly argued that the Web site does not violate copyright law because the site does not host any copyrighted material, but simply provides a service by indexing the BitTorrents.

U is for Usenet.com

Regarded as a source of much pirated material, this bulletin board site is being sued by the RIAA. Unlike The Pirate Bay, Usenet allows paying customers to download files in a way that is nearly impossible to track. But, like the Swedish site, Usenet has had to defend itself from charges that it encourages its users to violate copyright law.

V is for video games
The Entertainment Software Association says the industry loses $3 billion annually to online piracy.

W is for "Warez"
Slang for any movies, music, applications or any other materials being traded in violation of copyright law.

X is for "X-Men Origins: Wolverine"
A version of the upcoming blockbuster leaked online in March this year, the film has already been downloaded over a million times. The FBI says it is investigating the source of the leak, and the film's star Hugh Jackman has spoken out, calling the leak "a serious crime," and "heartbreaking."

Y is for YouTube
The ubiquitous video site has been sued by major companies like Viacom for publishing and proliferating unauthorized video content online. YouTube has responded by removing copyrighted content, but popular clips of television programs are often reposted by users as soon as they are taken down.

Z is for Zune
Microsoft's answer to the iPod plans to make its entire catalogue of music DRM-free, which will make it even easier to copy and share copyrighted music.

Twitter hit by denial-of-service attack

(CNN) -- Internet attacks shut down the social networking site Twitter for about two hours on Thursday morning and caused glitches in other sites like Facebook and LiveJournal, a blogging site.

Some Twitter users expressed near-panic that the site was not working properly Thursday.

It's unclear if the attacks were coordinated against the social media sites.

Twitter says its site's blackout was caused by a "denial of service attack," which likely means a hacker used a herd of infected computers to send bad information to the site to overwhelmed it.

A post to Twitter's blog said its Web site was back online before noon ET, but the site's users still were reporting problems.

"We are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack," the message from the company says.

Facebook and other social networking sites appeared to be affected by Twitter's shut-down, too. Twitter runs applications through those sites and there was speculation that the glitches were related.

"Earlier this morning, we encountered issues within our network that resulted in a short period of degraded site experience for some visitors," said Facebook spokeswoman Kathleen Loughlin.

"No user data was at risk, and the matter is now resolved for the majority of users. We're monitoring the situation to ensure that users continue to have the fast and reliable experience they've come to expect from Facebook," she said.

Twitter's site went down around 9:30 a.m. ET on Thursday and was back online by about 11:30 a.m.

It's unclear who plotted the attack against Twitter and what their motives may have been. Internet attacks sometimes hit Web sites as they become popular. Security experts say financial motives often are behind modern cyber-attacks. Watch Mashable's Adam Ostrow on the Twitter outage

Twitter -- a micro-blogging site where users post 140-character messages to their followers -- has soared in popularity in recent months. According to comScore, a Web tracking firm, the site had 44 million unique visitors in June.

Thursday's incident highlights the degree to which people depend on online social networks to feel connected to the world.

Some Twitter and Facebook users expressed near-panic that the sites were not working properly. Others reacted with ambivalence.

This is not the first time Twitter has been hit with a cyber-attack. Last month, a hacker broke into the personal Google accounts of Twitter employees, stealing personal information and company financial reports and posting them online.

In an e-mail to CNN.com, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said that incident is not related to Thursday's security breach.

"There's no indication that this attack is related to any previous activities. We are currently the target of a denial of service attack," Stone said in the e-mail.

"Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we defend and later investigate."

Don DeBolt, director of threat research at CA, a computer security company, said it's too early to tell who or what may be behind the Twitter attack.

But he said denial-of-service attacks target specific Web sites.

"To be effective, [these attacks] need to be focused on a Web site or a series of Web sites," he said. "It's not going to be something where malware (harmful software) is going to be deployed and then randomly attacks Web sites."

John Harrison, a researcher with Web security firm Symantec, said it is very difficult to learn the identity of the attacker, or attackers, as they could be anywhere on Earth and the infected network could span several countries.

Logging on to sites such as Twitter while they are under attack only makes the situation worse because it adds to the overloading of the system, he said.

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team says it's impossible for Web developers to fully prevent such attacks. But everyday computer users can ensure that their machines aren't used in a coordinated attack like the one seen Thursday.

To protect their computers, consumers should update anti-virus software, create passwords that are difficult to crack and maintain computer firewalls, the agency says.

iPad phishing scams still going strong

iPad's instant popularity is - by now - the stuff of legends, and the possibility of receiving it as a reward for being a BETA tester, participating in a survey or any similar low-effort-great-reward type of scheme, still hasn't lost its allure.

If it had, we wouldn't be seeing messages such as these on Facebook (or, for that matter, anywhere on the Internet):


The shortened link takes the naive user to a page that says that 5,000 BETA testers for the iPad are wanted, and that after testing the device for 2 months, the testers will get to keep it as payment/reward for their trouble.

To be a part of this testing group, the victim needs only to apply by sharing their contact information and the key (i.e. the password) to their email account:


Zscaler warns that if the victims fail to realize that this last request doesn't seem quite right, they will be falling pray to a well known group of scammers who have a history of using the iPad lure in order to phish for user credentials.

How to Prevent Your Website from Hackers?

Guidelines to secure your websites and web servers from being hacked.

Old scripts

Please remember that old installations are an open invitation for hackers. So, if you have installed Joomla or WordPress that you tried out a couple of months ago; please remove it. You should make sure that any script you install on your servers is of the latest version. It takes 5 seconds to hack an old version of Joomla, upload a shell script and have total control over your account.

Passwords

Never use easy to guess passwords or the same password more than once; if someone finds a password of yours they will try it everywhere else until they reach success. If someone finds your webmail password you’re pretty much guaranteed they’ll try it elsewhere – maybe in cPanel, maybe on your online banking!

Cloak Your Folders

You should keep a blank index.html in all of the folders inside your public_html; this will make sure the contents can’t be easily viewed on the internet. CPanel has this function, check out ‘Index Manager’. It’s always a good idea to keep your files and folders secret.

Password Protect Your Admin Folder

You should password protect the admin folder of any scripts you are using, this provides an extra layer of security and is highly recommended. You can do this in cPanel by clicking the Directory Protection link.

So You Got Hacked?

If you got clicked that something has happened, maybe some spam was sent from your account, or you found you were hosting a phishing site, the first step you need to take is changing your passwords. All of them – cPanel, email, site admin passwords, everything.

Next up, go through your web space and remove all old script installations, remember if you installed plugins in your scripts (modules for Joomla/WordPress etc) they can be hacked too! Make sure they’re up-to-date too.

You can check the Error Logs in cPanel for suspicious requests. Generally, a hacker leaves suspicious files around, so look for such files within your public_html folder. Once the files are found, take the details of those files, such as date and time that the file was uploaded, the file name, folder it was in, and inform your web host, so they can check through. Then delete the files.

Being hacked can happen to anyone at all, your security will always depend on its weakest point. If you don’t keep things up-to-date and secure, your site will be hacked and be used for criminal activity in one way or another – however, now is the perfect time to stop this from happening.

Kaspersky 2011 11.0.0.232 Final Anti-Virus & Internet Security

Kaspersky 2011 11.0.0.232 Final

Anti-Virus & Internet Security

WHAT'S NEW IN KASPERSKY INTERNET SECURITY 2011

New in protection

The Sandbox technology, which uses virtualization methods to create a safe environment for running applications (Safe Run for Applications), has been significantly improved. The application now features the option to run suspicious applications on a dedicated virtual desktop, which ensures reliable protection of the operating system. Safe Run for Websites (safe browser), which protects data being entered by the user, has been implemented to allow handling websites that require entering confidential information.

* The scope of the Web Anti-Virus component has been expanded thanks to the new modules that had been added:

o Online Banking identifies banking websites and allows the user to switch to Safe Run for Websites, which has been designed to handle this sort of web resources.

o Safe Surf consists of previously implemented Kaspersky URL Advisor enhanced with a new mode of blocking websites with high threat rating calculated by Kaspersky Lab. When this mode is enabled, access to dangerous websites will be blocked. When viewing unknown websites, the component will offer the user to switch to Safe Run for Websites.

o Geo Filter lets you block or allow access to regional domains depending on their infection level.

* A new technology named Wisdom of the Crowd has been implemented; it provides information about applications usage frequency and data on trust group distribution among the participants of the Kaspersky Security Network service. This information allows making a weighed decision when assigning a trust status to a new application.

* Users of Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Windows 7 can enable Kaspersky Gadget, which displays the computer protection state and allows scanning objects for threats.

* System Watcher has been added, a new protection component, which analyzes file, registry, system and network activities on the computer, while collecting information about events detected by other protection components.

If any dangerous activity in the system is detected by Proactive Defense or File Anti-Virus (or in the course of virus scan), System Watcher rolls back the actions that have been performed by malicious programs.

System Watcher contains patterns of dangerous activity (BSS). Those patterns allows detecting both dangerous and suspicious activities on the computer. If any suspicious activity in the system is detected based on the patterns (or by Proactive Defense), a notification with information about the event is displayed on the screen.

* A new technology, which has been designed to run tasks on an idle computer, allows performing resource-intensive tasks, such as automatic update, scan of system memory, and scan of objects for rootkits, while the computer is turned on but remains idle.

* To improve reliability of the application, it provides protection against interception of DNS requests and substitution of network node addresses.

* In addition to HTTP traffic scan, Web Anti-Virus also scans FTP traffic now.

* Since new mail clients (such as Microsoft Live Mail) appear, Mail Dispatcher functionality is no longer supported.

What has been improved:

* The HIPS (Host-based Intrusion Prevention System) technology designed for controlling applications' activity has been significantly improved, which allows applying a unique set of restrictions and rules to an individual application, blocking run of untrusted applications until Kaspersky Internet Security is started, and excluding specified objects from the list of resources that should be controlled. The range of the application's privileges has been extended; a more accurate algorithm is now used to define application statuses.

* The Parental Control component has been enhanced and improved to better ensure control of messaging via social networks and IM clients, blockage of messaging with unwanted contacts and transfer of identity data, and restriction of computer and Internet usage time, file downloads, and run of various applications.

* The technologies of the Anti-Spam component have been enhanced. The image processing technology has been brought up to a new level of quality, the size of the databases has been reduced, and the text filtering technology for non-Latin languages has been improved.

* Advanced disinfection technology has also been improved. The AVPTool utility can be downloaded now. It scans the computer if any errors have been encountered when installing the application, thus giving rise to suspicions that the computer had been infected.

Thanks to a more efficient processing of installation errors detected when the computer is suspected of being infected, the rollback procedure has been improved for installation complicated by errors.

* The Rescue Disk creation service has been improved: an ISO image file can now be recorded on a CD or a USB data medium. The option to work in text mode has been added. When booting the system from the Rescue Disk, startup objects are scanned, in addition to boot sectors and file systems.

* The scope of the Kaspersky Security Network service has been extended. Protection and reliability of interaction with Kaspersky Security Network have been improved, including proxy server mode.

* The Urgent Detection System (UDS) technology has been enhanced by increasing the speed of adding new threats into the database and by improving the algorithm of UDS access.

* The application now scans the system for rootkits with higher efficiency. The new updatable component allows detecting a greater number of rootkits and adding entries of new rootkits into databases with a shorter response time. Fully updatable disinfection logic ensures quick counteraction to new types of rootkits.

* The Anti-Phishing technology has been enhanced thanks to use of analysis of images, HTML pages and URLs, as well as linguistic analysis of text content in messages.

* News Agent has been optimized still remaining the main tool of news delivery initiated by Kaspersky Lab.

* Automatic downloading and installation of a new version of the application have been implemented in addition to notification of release of a new version.

What's new in the application interface:

* The application interface has been optimized to simplify usage for beginners.

* Event notifications are completely redesigned to gain more intuitive and informative appearance.

* The context menu that provides access to the main features of the application has become more convenient and better structured.

* Starting from the 2011 version, custom component selection is not supported when installing the application. The application is installed in its entirety. If necessary, individual protection components can be excluded from the application interface

Free Hide Folder 2.3

free Hide Folder is a free computer security software to hide your private folders. It is very useful to keep your personal data away from others. Others will not know where your personal files exist and they will not be able to accidentally view them. You can hide folders simply with a few mouse clicks. Free Hide Folder is protected by a password that you can change or remove at any time.

Download: 740KB

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Stealing History Without Javascript

Making The Web has a demonstration of a neat trick to display your browser history even without the use of Javascript.

The trick is that it's not really scanning your history. The technique works by using CSS attributes which display whenever a site is visited. They use this in combination with a large list of popular web addresses. They display all of these addresses in an IFRAME with CSS attributes such that they will display only if visited, so the ones you've visited show up.

The main hole in the technique is that if a site is not in their list it won't show up in the history list they display. The other hole is that it's not clear that they can do a whole lot with the information if Javascript is not enabled, although the demo site claims to collect some data and display what it claims to be a "most visited pages" list. I'm not saying this is a lie, but I couldn't figure out from the source how they collected it.

There has been some controversy over whether the technique works with NoScript installed, as the author insists it does. I didn't test it with NoScript, but I did disable Javascript in the Firefox and confirmed that it was disabled, and the demo worked well.

Kaspersky Anti-Virus & Internet Security 2010 KEYS

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USB Threat Defender - Ultimate USB Anti-Virus, maximumprotection guaranteed.USB Threat Defender is not just another autorun.inf virus remover, it takes more than that to provide maximumprotection guarantee.USB Threat Defender is the ultimate USB Anti-Virus, its unique Proactive and Definition scan Technology combined together unleashes a new security stronghold level to give rock-solid protection against any USB threat, guaranteed.This new protection level detects and removes both known and unknown threats missed by your Anti-Virus to give maximum protection against any USB threat attack. It also removes pre-existing installed viruses from your system.USB Threat Defender is designed to work without regular updates, hence it protects both Online and Offline computers of Home and Business effectively.

Download: 4.97MB
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Spyware HelpDesk - FREE with SpyHunter

Automated custom fixes for specific unsolved Malware

Spyware HelpDesk (included with SpyHunter) is an interactive feature that is dedicated to providing a personalized one-on-one technical support service to help you with your malware-related needs. With Spyware Helpdesk, if you have a spyware problem that SpyHunter cannot automatically fix, our technicians will create a unique custom fix for your system.

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PC Advisor: Group test: what's the best security software?

Nine 2009 internet security suites compared

PC Advisor staff
March 21, 2009

A run-of-the-mill internet security suite will protect your PC from most web threats, but that simply isn't good enough for discerning users. In our ultimate security group test, PC Advisor and independent lab AV-Test assess nine of the best suites.

2009 security suites: what's the best security software?

With attacks on your PC increasing in frequency and sophistication, it's more vital than ever that you use effective security software. The best protection, as our tests of the latest all-in-one suites show, can thwart the nastiest viruses, spy- and adware and phishing schemes.

In the early days of computer malware, you could get by without antivirus software simply by surfing carefully. Today's crooks love nothing more than to discover a nasty zero-day security flaw, for which there's no defence, then infiltrate otherwise benign and popular websites with hidden, malicious programming designed to attack that flaw. While relatively uncommon, such tactics can ensnare even the most cautious surfer. Today, you need protection.

PC Advisor got respected independent testing lab AV-Test.org to put nine comprehensive internet-security suites through the ringer. Its researchers poked and prodded, surfed and scanned, until one of the contenders - Norton Internet Security 2009 - came out on top.

Symantec's suite did an excellent job, starting with an overall malware-detection rate just short of 99 percent. It has an attractive and well laid-out interface, and its automatic updates send new malware signatures to your PC every few minutes.

More internet security product reviews

The designers also incorporated cloud computing, with on-the-spot online checks to supplement local scans. Yet another feature compares new programs on your PC against a database of known apps, a step meant to improve the suite's performance by preventing it from scanning safe programs.

Harnessing the immediacy of the internet is a trend this year. The F-Secure, McAfee and Panda packages all use online checks to detect new malware more quickly, without waiting for a scheduled signature update.

Although Norton deserves its top spot, it isn't for everyone. Norton can't perform backups, for instance, while four other suites here can. And while its detection rate is very good, it isn't the best - Avira wins that accolade. It's also pretty pricey.

2009 security suites: how we test

To evaluate the suites, PC Advisor partnered with AV-Test. This independent testing laboratory pits each suite against its ‘zoo'
of 654,914 backdoor apps, bots, worms, Trojan horses and password stealers, as well as 46,246 adware samples. Each suite was allowed to connect to the internet to use online checks, where available. Tests also determined each suite's ability to clean up malware infections.

Each suite had to detect and remove active and inactive rootkits - stealth malware that hides criminal software on your PC. Heuristic and behaviour-detection tests determined how well a suite could spot malware for which it didn't yet have a signature.

The heuristic tests used two- and four-week-old signature files to simulate encounters with new malware, while the behaviour tests examined how well a suite can identify malware based solely on the way it acts. AV-Test also assessed scan speed, both on demand (scans initiated manually or on a schedule) and on access (scans of files as the PC opens or accesses them).

More internet security product reviews

We then assessed design and interfaces: determining how well each suite handled alerts and phishing blocks, whether default settings were appropriate and how easy it was for advanced users to change them.

For security apps, performance and effectiveness are more important than aesthetics. As a result, our scoring depended largely on each suite's malware-detection and disinfection rates, along with the scan speed. We also considered price, support and features in the final rankings. Unless otherwise stated, prices given are for a one-year, single-user licence.

2009 security suites: in-depth reviews

* Avira Premium Security Suite 8.2 review
* BitDefender Internet Security 2009 review RECOMMENDED
* F-Secure Internet Security 2009 review
* Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 review
* McAfee Internet Security Suite 2009 review
* Panda Internet Security 2009 review
* Symantec Norton Internet Security 2009 review BEST BUY!
* Trend Micro Internet Security Pro 2009 review
* Webroot Internet Security Essentials review

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ZDNet Reviews: Internet Security & Firewall

Find The Right Internet security and firewall

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