Sunday, March 4, 2007

PC World - Microsoft OneCare Last in Antivirus Tests Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare came in dead last out of a group of 17 antivirus programs tested against hundreds of thousands of worms, viruses, Trojan horses and other malware, an Austrian antivirus researcher reported Wednesday. The AV Comparatives Web site, which is maintained by Andreas Cleminti from Innsbruck, Austria, posts quarterly results of tests that pit the top antivirus products against a dynamic list of nearly half a million individual pieces of malware. 10:27:26 PM

Microsoft OneCare Last in Antivirus Tests. Microsoft OneCare Last in Antivirus Tests. Juha-Matti Laurio writes  "PC World has a story reporting that Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare came in dead last out of a group of 17 antivirus programs tested against hundreds of thousands of pieces of malware. The report of an Austrian antivirus researcher was released at the AV Comparatives Web site this week. Several free AV products were included in the test as well." ---  While the top dog was able to find 99.5% of the malicious code, OneCare clocked in at 82.4%. Of course, there's no metric for the severity of the malware in the 17% gap. [Slashdot] 10:23:42 PM

Month of PHP Bugs Has Begun. Month of PHP Bugs Has Begun. An anonymous reader writes  "The previously announced Month of PHP Bugs started three days ago, and already lists 8 security vulnerabilities in PHP and PHP related software. From the site: 'This initiative is an effort to improve the security of PHP. However we will not concentrate on problems in the PHP language that might result in insecure PHP applications, but on security vulnerabilities in the PHP core. During March 2007 old and new security vulnerabilities in the Zend Engine, the PHP core and the PHP extensions will be disclosed on a day by day basis. We will also point out necessary changes in the current vulnerability management process used by the PHP Security Response Team.'"  [Slashdot] 10:01:57 PM

Hacker Defeats Hardware-based Rootkit Detection. Hacker Defeats Hardware-based Rootkit Detection. Manequintet writes "Joanna Rutkowska's latest bit of rootkit-related research shatters the myth that hardware-based (PCI cards or FireWire bus) RAM acquisition is the most reliable and secure way to do forensics. At this year's Black Hat Federal conference, she demonstrated three different attacks against AMD64 based systems, showing how the image of volatile memory (RAM) can be made different from the real contents of the physical memory as seen by the CPU. The overall problem, Rutkowska explained, is the design of the system that makes it impossible to reliably read memory from computers. "Maybe we should rethink the design of our computer systems so they they are somehow verifiable," she said." [Slashdot] 9:52:23 PM

© Copyright 2007 Paul Hardwick. Last update: 3/18/07; 5:40:11 PM.