Tag Archives: Mobile

Avast

Welcome to the Team, Remotium!

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I’m glad to announce that we have acquired Remotium, a leader in virtual enterprise mobility, headquartered in Silicon Valley. Remotium’s award-winning and patent-pending technology, the Remotium Virtual Mobile Platform (VMP), provides enterprises with secure access to business-critical applications from anywhere and from any mobile or desktop device. With this product, corporate mobile users have all their personal data and apps resident on their mobile (iOS or Android) while all their corporate data and apps reside and execute on a server and are only displayed on the mobile. This is the perfect fit for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environments.

Remotium‘s mobile solutions address the needs of modern enterprises. As more and more companies support BYOD policies, the question of how to implement these policies efficiently and securely is top of mind for everyone. As people bring their own devices to work, the lines between business and private data become blurry. In a study, IBM found that millions of people use dating apps on company smartphones, which could expose themselves and their employers to hacking, spying and theft. Out of the 41 dating apps analyzed by the researchers, 26 had medium or high severity vulnerabilities.

With Remotium’s technology, companies have the visibility and security needed to ensure data integrity and corporate compliance. At the same time, users enjoy increased privacy, as well as apps that look and feel consistent across mobile and desktop platforms. Remotium was named “Most Innovative Company” at RSA® Conference 2013 and won the Best of Show award at Interop Tokyo in June 2015.

With this acquisition we are expanding our mobile offerings into the enterprise space. Although our near-term approach with Remotium is to make the products successful in the enterprise market, we also see a tremendous opportunity to leverage this innovative technology within our traditional consumer and SMB markets.

We are pleased to add the Remotium staff to our team of more than 600 Avast employees – together we will further accelerate Remotium’s growth and expand its capabilities across enterprise mobility platforms.

AVG

Windows 10 Wi-Fi Sense could be a privacy problem

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Windows 10 is here and it has unleashed a wave of new features and tools for its users. One of which is Wi-Fi Sense, a multi-purpose feature designed to make connecting to the Internet a breeze from Windows Phones.

As explained on the Windows Phone feature page, it does this by:

  • Automatically connecting you to crowdsourced open Wi-Fi networks it knows about.
  • Accepting a Wi-Fi network’s terms of use on your behalf and providing additional info for you to networks that require it.
  • Letting you exchange password-protected Wi-Fi network access with your contacts to give and get Internet access without seeing each other’s Wi-Fi network passwords.

 

While these are potentially convenient features to use, I have security and privacy concerns regarding their implementation.

It goes without saying, that automatically connecting to open Wi-Fi networks is a bad idea. As we’ve explained several times before, not all free or open Wi-Fi networks are secure and others can be deliberately malicious.  Accessing the Internet on these hotspots can lead to your traffic being intercepted by an attacker, known as a ‘man in the middle’ attack.

Accepting a Wi-Fi network’s terms of use automatically on your behalf seems like an equally bad idea to me. Before we even consider what terms Wi-Fi sense may be agreeing to on your behalf, we don’t even know if the landing page is legitimate or encrypted.

As a human, being prompted for an email address or other personal details gives us a chance to assess the trustworthiness of a provider and make a judgement. Wi-Fi Sense takes this decision making away and will seemingly hand over your information to any network asking for it. This could be a privacy concern.

The last feature, sharing Wi-Fi passwords with your contacts is a little less concerning but it is dependent on complete trust within your contacts.

In combination with the other two features, receiving a network key from a contact could cause you to automatically connect to a malicious network and potentially put you at risk.

 

How to disable Wi-Fi Sense

Disabling Wi-Fi Sense is simple. On your Windows 10 device go to Settings > Wi-Fi > Wi-Fi Sense.

 

Tips for safe Wi-Fi Usage

When it comes to surfing the web from your phone, there are generally two things that should concern you:

Wi-Fi-Hacking: Wi-Fi hacking is the most common threat when it comes to public Wi-Fi. When you connect to an public Wi-Fi network (i.e. coffee shop, airport, or hotel), others maybe able to intercept your Internet traffic, collecting your passwords, private photos, emails, browser cookies and a lot more personal info.

Wi-Fi tracking is the second big issue.  Currently specialized software solutions allow virtually anybody to use your phone’s Wi-Fi signal, to track your location and in some instances identify you. Wi-Fi tracking is even more worrying as most smartphone users have their Wi-Fi on all the time. This is increasingly an issue as retailers can use your Wi-Fi signal to track how you move around stores or around the city and even identify who you are. And that’s not all, if you keep your Wi-Fi open all the time hackers can trick your phone into connecting to a fake Wi-Fi hotspot.

 

At the AVG Innovation Lab in Amsterdam, we developed AVG Wi-Fi Assistant to help combat both of these problems.

VPN Technology

AVG Wi-Fi Assistant can encrypt all the data coming and going from your device helping to ensure that even if someone is snooping on your traffic, that your data is still secured.

Wi-Fi Automation

To help prevent the Wi-Fi tracking issue detailed above, AVG Wi-Fi Assistant prevents your device from automatically joining public Wi-Fi networks by turning off your Wi-Fi when you’re not using it. This helps to keep you safe from trackers.

Here is Tony Anscombe with more tips on securing your Wi-Fi connection from an Android device.

Video

How to keep your mobile while using public Wi-Fi

 

AVG

What data do you protect on your phone?

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With over 100 million installs of AVG AntiVirus for Android, we help a huge number of people protect their devices and their data. One of the popular tools in our app is the “App Locker”.

By analyzing a sample of anonymized user data, we’ve learned which information users want to protect the most and have discovered how app updates actually make us more aware of our privacy than before.

 

Messaging Apps come out on top

When it comes to data that people want to keep private, nothing beats personal messages. Four of the top five most locked apps were messaging apps with WhatsApp the most popular.

Top 5

 

Personal data

As one might expect, after messaging apps, social networking and photo apps were the next most locked. People have a clear understanding that they want to keep their personal life private and take steps to the data stored within these apps

App Categories

 

The Privacy Window

Once installed, it’s easy to forget how an app may have access to sensitive data or personal files. We’ve seen that one thing that causes us to remember these permissions are updates. We understood this to mean that there is privacy window in which we all think about apps and their permissions.

Our apps allow us to turn our smartphones into incredibly powerful devices that do everything for us. In return though, we give apps, and their developers access to our data and our lives. To use Instagram, for example, we must first allow it access to our pictures.

This means that each app carefully creates a unique and personal experience for each user, they also become private things that perhaps we don’t want to share.

That’s the idea behind the App Locker feature in AVG AntiVirus for Android. Available as part of the PRO product, App Locker is designed to help you decide what you would like to keep private and password protected.

It could be your messages or even, an app that you don’t want your child to use when they have your device, it’s entirely up to you.

Download AVG AntiVirus for Android today.

AVG

AVG demonstrates robust anti-theft solution in partnership with Qualcomm

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Losing a smartphone means so much more than the cost of the device itself – personal and business information, messages, emails, contacts and social networking profiles may all be potentially compromised. When you add banking and shopping apps, the financial costs and associated risks can also escalate significantly.

That’s why we’re pleased to announce that AVG is working with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a leading supplier of semiconductors to the mobile industry, to expand the functionality of our applications to include Qualcomm SafeSwitch kill switch technology on devices with select Snapdragon chipsets.

Unlike other anti-theft alternatives, SafeSwitch provides a robust yet reversible kill switch solution that locks the device at the chip level, rendering it unusable and extremely difficult to crack. SafeSwitch also helps protect user privacy by encrypting the device’s storage, making it very difficult for attackers to obtain any personal or privileged information from a stolen device.

Any attempt to replace the SIM card, perform a factory reset or brute force the passcode will lock down the device and render it temporarily unusable. After locking, the device owner can unlock the device and restore it to its pre-locked condition by entering the master passcode.

AVG and Qualcomm conducted a demonstration of the SafeSwitch solution on a device incorporating Qualcomm’s premium-tier Snapdragon 810 chip at the 5th Annual International Cybersecurity conference held in Tel Aviv, Israel, June 22nd -25th, 2015.

Following the conference, AVG and Qualcomm Technologies will continue working together to offer a joint end-to-end commercial solution later this year.

AVG

Will your next password be an emoji?

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Emoji’s such as smiley faces and others pictographs used commonly by many people nowadays have been put forward as a possible replacement to the humble password or PIN by a British start-up called Intelligent Environments.

As reported in The Guardian recently, the concept lends itself to our natural ability to remember pictures much more vividly than standard characters like letters and numbers.

Add to that research that shows 64% of millennials are using Emoji’s almost exclusively in their communication, and one wonders if this trend just might have some merit in the future.

The method proposed is that instead of entering your password or PIN, instead you would select a sequence of 4 Emoji pictures from a possible set of 44.  The math behind this says that an Emoji “password” would therefore be one out of a possible 3,748,096 combinations.

However, the question of whether this would be more secure over the standard password, and in particular a 4-digit PIN is open for debate.

While technically your 4-digit PIN is only one from a combination of 10,000 choices, the implementation on your mobile device tends to be much more secure, by the fact that incorrect attempts will result in gradually increasing timeouts – making it much more difficult and impractical to crack easily.

And consider that, just as with passwords, it is possible that people will select Emoji sequences that are quite predictable.  For example, selecting Emoji’s that tell a common story, like a Man, a love heart, a Woman, and a bunch of flowers; it’s quite possible people will end up selecting popular Emoji versions of the 1234 PIN equivalent.

On the positive side, think of how hard writing down your Emjoi “password” is going to be for those of us who aren’t artistically gifted.

If you are concerned about only using a 4-digit PIN on your mobile device, however, there are options you can change:

  • For Android users, depending on the version you have, you can select from PIN, Password, and also Smart Lock features. Using the Pattern option (where you draw a pattern on the screen) is not recommended as the smudge marks you leave on the screen can be enough to give it away!

For more information keeping your mobile device safe, check out the video below 6 Tips to Secure your Android Phone video.

Video

6 Tips to Secure Your Android Phone

 

Until next time, stay safe out there.

AVG

Tablet AntiVirus Security FREE scoops award

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We are happy to announce that AVG’s Tablet AntiVirus Security FREE has been voted as the best tablet security app in a Czech and Slovak app award.

The awards, organized by Czech company Tuesday Business Network, are designed to celebrate the very best of Czech and Slovak app development industry.

A shortlist of products was drawn up by public nominations and an expert panel selected the winners.

AVG Tablet AntiVirus Security FREE has many powerful protection and anti-theft features that can help you keep your device safe as well as protecting the data stored on it.

These include:

  • App scanning
  • Remote locating/locking/wiping if it gets lost or stolen.
  • Task killer to help you improve the speed of your device
  • Secure web browser to protect you from malicious links and phishing attacks
  • Battery, storage and data package usage monitors
  • And many more

 

Download AVG Tablet AntiVirus Security FREE from Google Play today.

AVG

Screen Time: Adults need to lead by example

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I think it reveals some pretty interesting insights about the digital family. Among them, the nagging worry about our kids’ screen time and, likewise, their worry about their moms’ and dads’ obsession with mobile devices – and the impact it’s having on the quality of our parent/child interactions.

As AVG senior evangelist Tony Anscombe points out ,, it’s really important that we set good habits within the home.

Unfortunately, almost a third of parents in our survey conceded that they actually aren’t setting very good examples.

As a case in point, on Father’s Day, I sat in a fine-dining restaurant and watched the dynamics of some digital families play out during the holiday Sunday brunch.

Across the room from my table, a father and son sat. Dad was on his smartphone.  Junior, a grade schooler, was on his iPad…Not a word was being exchanged between the pair during the entire meal. They sat isolated from each other, with either of them barely looking away from their device, except to give and receive their food orders.

The sight of the non-communicating father and son saddened me. It not only illustrated a failure to lead by example, but one of the worst digital lifestyle habits – using mobile devices during a meal, and a time when we should be paying attention to each other. (The latter was also called out as a key issue in the Digital Diaries study).

Closer by, at the table directly next to me on Sunday, was another digital family –this one definitely more engaged with each other and animated. Mom, Dad and teen daughter were merrily talking. Their digital devices only came out when Mom and the teen daughter posed the family for a few selfies. After attempting to do it themselves –and keep the self in Selfie—several times and not getting the desired shot, the Mom handed the smartphone to the waiter and arranged the family for a better angle. Snap. Photo taken and immediately posted on social media.

We often hear stories about children having an unhealthy relationship with technology, but it’s important to remember that it’s our role as parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts to set a good example. It’s up to us to engage them beyond the screen and perhaps examine our own device usage.

The latest Digital Diaries research has spurred me on to spend more time in person with my family and to indulge in the occasional digital detox. I hope you do too.

AVG

Kids Competing with Mobile Phones for Parents’ Attention

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AMSTERDAM – June 24, 2015 – Mobile phones are gaining an increasing share in the battle for parental attention, with a third of children, surveyed for a recent study, saying their parents spent equal or less time with them, than on their devices. The research, conducted by AVG® Technologies N.V. (NYSE: AVG), the online security company™ for more than 200 million monthly active users, examined children’s perceptions of their parents’ mobile device use, and uncovered some worrying trends.

Hinting at ongoing digital intrusion upon family life, over 50 percent of the children questioned, felt that their parents checked their devices too often (54 percent); and their biggest grievance, when given a list of possible, bad device habits, was that their parents allowed themselves to be distracted by their device during conversations (36 percent) – something that made a third of the complainants feel unimportant (32 percent).

When asked about their device use, half of all parents agreed that it was too frequent (52 percent), and many also worried about how this looked to the younger generation. Almost a third (28 percent) felt that they didn’t set a good example for their children with their device use.

“With our kids picking up mobile devices at an increasingly younger age, it is really important that we set good habits within the home, early on,” said Tony Anscombe, Senior Security Evangelist at AVG Technologies. “Children take their cues from us for everything else, so it is only natural that they should do the same with device use. It can be hard to step away from your device at home; but with a quarter of parents telling us that they wished their child used their device less (25 percent), they need to lead by example and consider how their behavior might be making their child feel.”

In a country by country comparison, Brazilian parents topped the survey for device use, with 87 percent of children stating their parents used mobile devices too much. More worryingly, 59 percent of Brazilian parents admitted to using the phone while driving – interestingly, 56 percent of children in Brazil also said they would confiscate a parent’s device, if they could.

Digital Diaries Infographic

 

Methodology:

AVG commissioned an online survey, interviewing parents and their children, between the ages of 8-13, to identify perceptions and realities of parental device use in the following markets: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. A total of 6,117 completed the survey during June 2015. The market research company, Research Now, carried out the fieldwork using their proprietary panels.