Antivirus Vendors
Just imagine the following scenario: Your birthday is around the corner and you’ve planned a big party – including lots of foods and drinks. So you go shopping and gather everything you think you need and it’s fun. Until you get out of the store and have to carry everything home somehow. Since you don’t […]
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Netflix has enjoyed huge success over the last couple of years. As stated in the company’s overview, they have over 93 million members in over 190 countries enjoying more than 125 million hours of TV shows and movies per day.
Not bad for a company that started out during the declining years of physical entertainment, renting out DVD’s by mail.
Unfortunately, success often comes at a cost. Along with the adulation and well wishing, it often garners other types of, unwanted, attention. In the case of Netflix, this attention, as you can imagine, is increasingly coming from malicious cybercriminals.
What exactly are they doing though?
Cybercriminals are using several methods to breach vulnerabilities in people’s accounts. People who are probably too busy binge watching shows like Black Mirror to know what’s going on. Oh the irony!
Among the methods these cybercriminals are reportedly using are the theft of user credentials that can be sold on the deep web, the exploiting of vulnerabilities, and most recently, the infecting of systems with Trojans capable of stealing the user’s financial and personal information.
They could be sold on to other cybercriminals wanting to use the service for free. There’s another layer to the equation. A double-crossing of sorts; the lure of a free account could be used to trick someone into installing malware or ransomware onto their laptop.
Cybercriminals using details in this way can make a profit out of the initial selling of the information as well as by taking hostage of the same persons data. Never trust a criminal.
Trend Labs Security recently came across a ransomware luring Windows users via a pirate login generator. This is a typical way illegal websites share premium and paid for website details for free, as shown below.
Clicking the “Generate Login” button in this case leads to another prompt window that purportedly contains the stolen information of a genuine Netflix account. RANSOM_NETIX.A uses these fake windows as a distraction, however, all the while performing its encryption routine on 39 files, unbeknownst to most users.
The ransomware is employed using an AES-256 encryption algorithm and appends the files with the .se extension. As can be seen below, the ransom note demands $100 worth of Bitcoin (0.18 BTC).
This is actually relatively little, as ransomware demands go, some iterations demanding $500 dollars within a very short time frame. Others even ask you to infect your friends with ransomware in order to decrypt your information.
There are, of course, two victims in this ransomware scam; those who are unknowingly having their details used to lure the other type of victim, and the other one who receives the ransomware.
The first type of victim can perform a simple action if they suspect they’re account is being used illegally. Look through the “recently watched” section of your Netflix account to see if any shows are popping up that you haven’t seen. For this reason it’s good practice not to share your account with many people, however tempting it may be to allow friends or family in on the action.
It’s also good practice to stick to your provider’s security recommendations. As always, be wary of unsolicited emails pretending to offer legitimate services. A good antivirus, of course, can also act as a barrier to certain types of malware and cyber attacks.
For the second type of victim, the advice is simple; pay for the service. The ten euros a month in savings really won’t seem so great when the device it’s used on, and everything on it, is at the mercy of cybercriminals.
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Talking Android ransomware sounds like something out of a science fiction movie. It’s not – it’s very real, explains ESET’s Lukas Stefanko.
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According to Kaspersky Lab’s research, more than two in five (43%) businesses who were victim to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on their IT system believe their competitors were behind it.
Two presentation sessions will showcase how IT Service Providers can add value and help small and medium businesses minimise the latest cyber threats.
AVG Business by Avast will be presenting during London’s premier annual business technology event, Cloud Security Expo. With Gartner predicting 8.4 billion more devices will join the Internet of Things this year, how small to medium businesses (SMBs) manage the risk to their security as these devices enter the modern workplace presents one of their greatest challenges. At the same time, this is also an opportunity for managed service providers to build new programmes that offer the value and support their clients require and extend new revenue lines for their own business.
PRESENTATION 1: Add a Million pounds to your valuation – or 10 million
PRESENTATION 2: How to protect your business from – and minimize – cyber threats
AVG Business by Avast will also be showcasing its flagship products at Stand 1130 at the show. AVG Managed Workplace is the complete managed IT solution which provides unmatched ease of use, security and control of the entire IT infrastructure including all devices, applications and networks from a single pane with end-to-end visibility and remote monitoring and management.
AVG CloudCare is a SaaS endpoint protection suite that enables Managed Service Providers and resellers to remotely support their clients and deploy a robust portfolio of cloud security solutions for multiple clients also through a single pane of glass. It combines an uncomplicated cloud-based IT management capability with AVG’s award-winning AVG AntiVirus and AVG Content Filtering at an affordable price.
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Technology gets a bad reputation at times. It’s supposed to connect us, but really, it drives us apart. It’s making us less in touch with the world around us and less inclined to deal with emotional issues.
That may be a very one-sided view of things, but it’s hard to deny that people don’t hide behind their brightly lit screens on a daily basis.
Introducing MIT’s wearable AI system app, a piece of software designed to make people more in touch with their emotions.
How does it do this? Well, by putting them on a screen right in front of you, that’s how. The concept almost feels tailored to not allowing one to hide from their feelings by acquiring a glazed expression and burying their face into their device.
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Institute of Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) have recently come up with the idea for the tech device.
The device wasn’t designed specifically to prevent people using their devices to hide from their emotions, but rather to help people who may do so compulsively because of an underlying psychological issue.
The tech is based on the principle that human communication goes far beyond being purely verbal. People are constantly sending out signals through other means, like mannerisms, voice intonation and eye contact. These non-verbal signals can be difficult to read though for people with anxiety or for those who have developmental disorders such as Asperger’s syndrome.
This is what lead researchers at MIT to develop software that could capture audio data of a person speaking and analyze the speaker’s tone, pitch, energy, and vocabulary.
“Imagine if, at the end of a conversation, you could rewind it and see the moments when the people around you felt the most anxious,” says graduate student Tuka Alhanai, who co-authored a paper on the subject with PhD candidate Mohammad Ghassemi. “Our work is a step in this direction, suggesting that we may not be that far away from a world where people can have an AI social coach right in their pocket.”
According to MIT News, the students captured 31 different conversations of several minutes each before training two algorithms on the data. After analyzing the conversations, one algorithm classified them as either happy or sad, while the second labeled five-second blocks of the conversations as either positive, negative or neutral.
The model is 7.5 per cent more accurate than other existing approaches, however, it is not yet reliable enough to be used as part of a handheld social coaching device. According to Alhanai, this is very much the goal. To make this possible though, they will have to collect data on a much larger scale.
The model is 7.5 per cent more accurate than other existing approaches, however, it is not yet reliable enough to be used as part of a handheld social coaching device. According to Alhanai, this is very much the goal. To make this possible though, they will have to collect data on a much larger scale.
There is a slightly eerie implication to having our emotions read by an artificial intelligence. It might evoke images of HAL going haywire after lip-reading the protagonist’s plans to shut him down in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
While the tech obviously isn’t on the verge of allowing an AI to hatch a murderous plan, the team have urged caution in the way the system is used in the future.
The algorithm is run locally on the user’s device in order to protect personal information. Alhanai also emphasizes that a consumer version would have to set out clear protocols for getting consent from people involved in the conversations.
The thought of this type of technology being used for third-party data gathering and targeted ads is an uncomfortable one. Despite this, we can see the tech forming an important part in the future of wearables and AI. A huge technological step in a similar direction could also see lie detection playing a role in data security, something that could even be integrated into the security of a futuristic smart home.
MIT’s wearable emotion-reading technology is an interesting step towards integrating technology into the outside world. Augmented Reality companies like Magic Leap are promising a future of enhanced reality, projecting images seamlessly over the real world instead of cutting it out with virtual images. MIT’s new tech can, in one particular respect, be seen very much in the same vein.
Our tech will arguably be enhancing our emotional lives rather than dulling them.
Björn Schuller, professor and chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems at the University of Passau in Germany, seems to share this sentiment. Though he wasn’t involved in the project, he is fascinated about where this step could lead us:
“Technology could soon feel much more emotionally intelligent, or even ‘emotional’ itself.”
We’ll be keeping our eye on this new tech; a tantalizing step towards making technology form a seamless part of our lives instead of distracting us from things that are important in life.
The post A Smartwach Social Coach? New Tech Can Read Your Emotions appeared first on Panda Security Mediacenter.
What is Autopilot and where can I find it? Avira Autopilot is a browser extension exclusively for the Avira Scout browser. You can download Scout from here. Autopilot includes all the functions of the popular Avira Browser Safety (ABS) extension. Once you have downloaded, installed, and started Scout, you will see a green icon (see […]
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There is a real feeling that smartphones are becoming a bigger target for cybercriminals. So why are they so eager to get into our devices?
The post 10 reasons why cybercriminals target smartphones appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Kaspersky Lab today announced the findings of its Mobile Virusology malware report for 2016, which found a near-threefold rise in mobile malware detections compared to 2015 – with a total of 8.5 million malicious installations identified.
