Net Nanny offers Cyberbully Prevention Tips

Internet safety tips from the Ascentive team

As long as there have been schools, there have been bullies, and the Internet has created a whole new playground for them. Cyberbullying is now increasing at an alarming rate. Net Nanny ( http://www.netnanny.com ) encourages parents to take precautions to prevent cyberbullying, and when it occurs, to act quickly and decisively.

Most parents know that when a bullying incident occurs with their child, they should address it immediately. In the case of cyberbullying, online tools are now available to alert parents the moment something happens so they can react in real-time. When parents are alerted that their child may be the target of cyberbullying by a program such as Net Nanny, they should immediately follow these five guidelines:

1. Address it immediately. Speak frankly and openly about the incident with your child to get all the details possible. Ask direct and detailed questions.

2. Uncover the history. Determine if this is the first time for the incident or if it has been an on-going problem.

3. Understand your child’s feelings. Get a clear understanding of how your child feels. Are they just annoyed or are they scared, feeling threatened, or even contemplating extreme and dangerous actions such as retaliation or suicide

4. Create a plan together. Work with your child to determine how they (or you together) should deal with the cyberbullying. Your plan might be to include school officials in dealing with the issue, change user names and passwords for your child’s online activities, calling and speaking with parents of the offending bully and watching your child carefully for changes in behavior.

5. Consider professional help. If the incident warrants it, do not hesitate to get professional medical help or counseling for your child, and if you suspect any kind of criminal act or predator activity against your child, contact your local law enforcement agency.

“Email, websites, chat and social media are the places where cyberbullying usually occurs,” said Russ Warner, ContentWatch/Net Nanny CEO. “You can have a great relationship with your child, put in place many safety measures and do everything you can to protect them, but the bottom line is, you can’t stop their online activity. And when an incident occurs, parents need to act very quickly to help them and prevent future incidents. These five guidelines will certainly help.”

Net Nanny believes bullying in all its forms treads on the rights of children to attend school in a safe and secure environment, free from negative threats or discrimination. As cyberbullying increases with the proliferation of online social networks, Net Nanny believes parents, school officials, government agencies and corporations have a responsibility to do all they can to protect the rights of school children.

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Google launches Relief Efforts to help Japan

From the Ascentive:

In reaction to the devastation caused by the recent earthquake in Japan, Google and Googlers worldwide have collaborated to perform a commendable job to improve information flow. Below are some of the tools created by Google to help with the rescue efforts:

Centralized information

Google’s Crisis Response page in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean organizes all of Google’s efforts, with links to emergency hotlines, Person Finder, blackout schedules, maps and links to relief organizations receiving donations. Google has also optimized this Crisis Response page to make it more readable for those who do not have smartphones.

Person Finder

Google’s Person Finder allows people to enter the names of those they’re looking for or have found. You can also search by entering mobile phone numbers to see if they match any listings. Person finder has also been optimized for non-smartphone usage. Google is also asking people in shelters to take photos of the handwritten lists of names of current residents and email them to Google for inclusion in a public Picasa Web Album.

Satellite images

The company is also working with satellite partners GeoEye and DigitalGlobe to provide frequent updates to imagery of the hardest-hit areas to first responders as well as the general public. You can view this imagery in this Google Earth KML, browse it online through Google Maps or look through their Picasa album of before-and-after images of such places as Minamisanriku and Kesennuma.

Mapping

Developments on the ground are viewable by looking at several maps that track changing developments such as mapped rolling blackouts for areas that are affected by power outages. Data provided by Honda allows viewers to see which roads have been recently passable on this map or on a recent user-made Google Earth mashup with new satellite imagery. Google is also constantly updating a master map in Japanese and English with other data such as epicenter locations and evacuation shelters, and has also published a partial list of shelters.

Translation

Google has released an early experimental version of Google Translate for Android to help non-Japanese speakers in affected areas, in addition to  Google Translate, which provides translations for Japanese and 56 other languages.

Donations

In addition to donating $250,000 to help the people of Japan recover, Google has posted a Crisis Response resource page to find opportunities to donate. When you donate to Japan relief efforts through Google Checkout, the company absorbs your processing fees—so 100% of your donation goes to the organizations.

Clutterfreepc news: British Royal Navy Attacked!

Direct from clutterfreepc:

The British Royal Navy has been successfully attacked – by malware.

The Royal Navy’s website was recently shut down temporarily while military officials repaired the vulnerability. In addition to the website’s motto, which ironically reads “Modern and Relevant,” users saw a message telling them why they couldn’t access any information on the website during repairs.

“Unfortunately the Royal Navy website is currently undergoing essential maintenance. Please visit again soon,” the website read.

Meanwhile, in true cyber criminal fashion, the hackers responsible for the attack celebrated and boasted on anonymous blogs throughout the web. A cyber criminal known only by the moniker TinKode took credit and received praise for the attack.

“TinKode doesn’t need sophisticated weapons to disarm an army. He just need a PC,” an anonymous post on TinKode’s blog read.

Another hacker gave him a pat on the back. “Nice dude, really nice. Good job,” a hacker name Sirarcane added.

Cyber security authorities across the globe have discussed the implications that may come as a result of the attack on the British Royal Navy’s website. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for security firm Sophos, said the event is “embarrassing” for the British military’s cyber security, and said the country is fortunate TinKode didn’t use the hack for more malicious purposes.

“We can all be thankful that Tinkode’s activities appear to be have been more mischievous than dangerous,” Cluley wrote in a recent NakedSecurity blog post. “If someone with more malice in mind had hacked the site they could have used it to post malicious links on the Navy’s JackSpeak blog, or embedded a Trojan horse into the site’s main page.”

In fact, TinKode, who is believed to live in Romania, has a history of pointing out glaring web security flaws within networks that many users may have previously considered secure. According to Clulely, “TinKode has revealed security holes in NASA’s website, and published information about SQL injection vulnerabilities in sites belonging to the U.S. Army.”

Just as government cyber security has rebounded from these past attacks, Cluley hopes the British Royal Navy can limit the damage from TinKode’s attack and use it to prevent future issues.

“Hopefully efforts are in place now to secure any vulnerabilities and reduce the chances of such a serious security breach happening again in the future,” Cluley wrote. “It is to be hoped that the ultimate impact of this attack will be egg on the face of the Ministry of Defense – and better security practices in the future – rather than a more significant assault on a website presenting the public face of an important part of the armed forces.”

A number of other recent attacks have highlighted the importance of anti-malware software in government networks, including the Stuxnet virus’ successful infiltration of Iran’s energy infrastructure.

If the British Royal Navy can be attacked, anyone can!  To protect your PC, please visit ClutterFreePC at www.clutterfreepc.com.

 

 

Bad Santa: Holiday Malware “Gifts”

Internet Security Update  from PC Prima:

Just as retailers are preparing for the influx of online shopping in time for the holidays, cyber criminals are launching a growing amount of email-borne malware attacks aimed at less tech-savvy online shoppers, according to recent Google research.

Google studied spam email during the third quarter this year. Although overall spam was down from the previous quarter, the study showed a 10 percent increase from the same period last year.  Officials attribute much of the overall decline to increased government pressure on cyber crime.

A recent case in Russia eradicated the world’s leading email spam provider, Spamit.com, bringing the global spam count down significantly. Spamit.com was the backbone for most spammers, offering a service that sold code and email spam tools to bombard inboxes with false pharmaceutical messages. After Russian authorities launched the investigation, the website’s ringleader went missing and is believed to have fled the country.

Also, an international sting on botnets has eliminated some of the most dangerous spam attacks in the world. More than 100 cyber criminals in Europe and the U.S. were arrested last month, temporarily eliminating the source for the massively successful Zeus botnet.

However, the profit potential for scamming the vast number of unsuspecting, and typically uneducated, internet users that shop online before the holidays was too much for cyber criminals to ignore. Google’s research indicates that new scams have emerged to replace those that have been arrested, and new techniques will make email spam and viruses more elusive.

“New botnets have sprung up to take their place. And, if the volume of spam was lower, it was also dirtier than in 2009,” a Kaspersky Labs report reads. “That may indicate a push to build out bot networks in advance of the holiday season, when many users go online to purchase gifts, and spammers are more likely to find success pushing their own wares.”  PC Prima, a German anti-malware provider, reports that this international problem requires constant attention and updates to existing internet security solutions.

Among the new trends include using  recycled emails for spam messages carrying malware. According to the research, this trend has been successful because spam filters on most email products use an automated system to recognize text typically found in spam messages. By using emails that were initially used for other purposes, spam messages get their messages around these roadblocks, attaching a malicious link to target an unsuspecting user.

Other, more recent research has found that Google is cracking down on email borne cyber crime. Web Host Industry Review studied Google’s response to an influx of malicious sites, revealing a more strict policy on malicious sites found on the company’s search engine.

“To this end, we’re finding that Google is putting sites on the black list for a longer period of time,” Jason Remillard, founder and president of the Web Host Industry Review, wrote on the company’s website. “We’re seeing the same results with the other SEs and the requisite browser instances of the blacklist tables.”

Because cyber criminals have evaded international legal authorities’ anti-malware efforts, they are just as likely to avoid Google’s restrictions. To safely shop online this holiday season, security experts advise consistently updating antivirus software to protect against the latest cyber crime developments.

To update your anti-virus software, visit Clutter Free PC, or try our new German internet security solution, PC Prima.

Ascentive Alert: Beware of Scareware Scams!

A High-Priority Alert From Ascentive:

Cyber criminals are flocking to scareware scams. Recent research has found 40 percent of all false anti-malware solutions in the wild were created this year.

PandaLabs’ research found more than 5.6 million scareware scams in the wild. Nearly 2.3 million of these were launched between January and October of this year. Scareware, also known as rogueware, has only been known on the internet for four years, signifying a sudden jump in the trend, as cyber criminals continue to look for new ways to target unsuspecting PC users.

Rogueware’s rapid growth has propelled it into a much higher saturation in the overall malware market. According to the research, 46.8 percent of all computers were infiltrated by malware. Rogueware accounted for 10 percent of these infected devices.

These attacks are relatively sophisticated, with fake antivirus brands and formats designed to keep users from ever second-guessing their legitimacy. Specifically, the most successful scareware programs found in the study were SystemGuard2009, MSAntiSpyware2009 and MalwareDoctor, at 12.5 percent, 11.7 percent and 8.1 percent of the market, respectively. When users are presented with these programs, they generally trust them and, with their computer’s security in mind, download them willingly.  Reputable brands such as Ascentive‘s own Clutter Free PC and FinallyFast are fighting to catch malware scams wherever they hide, and it is a constant battle to defend against new attacks. However, these scams don’t stop here.

“Once they have infected a system, these applications try to pass themselves off as antivirus solutions that have detected hundreds of threats on the user’s computer,” PandaLabs explained in a recent release. “When the user attempts to remove the threats using the fake antivirus solution, they are asked to purchase the ‘full’ product license. Unfortunately, many people panic when they see this message and fall for the bait. Once they ‘buy the license,’ they will of course never hear from the ‘seller’ again, and the fake antivirus is still on their computer.”

The sudden popularity of rogueware scams may be a result of its widespread success. According to PandaLabs, rogueware has generated millions of dollars in revenues for the cyber criminals that create them. Not only do rogueware scams trick users into voluntarily loading malware onto their computers, they also persuade them to submit their credit card information. As result, cyber criminals are giving a computer through which they can further spread their scam, and can use the stolen credit card information to make purchases in the meantime. All the while, the user is under the impression that they purchased a legitimate security solution.

Worse still, fear of complex scareware scams may prevent consumers from protecting themselves against the very malware they most fear.  A representative at Clutter Free PC told us that disreputable companies have actually harmed consumers by making them frightened of all anti-malware software.  The results are chilling. 

Rogueware campaigns have recently made headlines. In order to prevent an infection, security experts advise users stick to trusted antivirus sources, regardless of the information presented by a lesser-known, potentially malicious antivirus provider.