VARINDIA IT MAGAZINE

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE According to a recent report generated by  Kaspersky Lab, the share of spam  in mail traffic fell sharply in November to 62.9 per cent, a decrease of over five percentage points compared to October’s average. It was the second month in a row that spammer activity was at a minimum for the year. Despite the percentage of phishing attacks also falling by half (0.015% of all mail), the danger posed by spam has not abated.  Malicious programs  were detected in 3.27% of email traffic – a slight increase on the previous month. Among the biggest sources of spam around the world, the leading countries are still China (32.7%) and the US (23.8%). The share of spam sent from China increased by 2 percentage points, while the share of spam originating in the US fell by 3.5 points..... See More

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE   Kaspersky Lab  has released a new research related to the discovery of the nation-state sponsored Flamecyber-espionage campaign.  During the research, conducted by  Kaspersky Lab  in partnership with International Telecommunication Union's cybersecurity executing arm, IMPACT, CERT-Bund/BSI and Symantec.... See More

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE   Kaspersky Lab has uncovered a set of malicious Android applications posing as security software. The malware is linked to the infamous Zeus Trojan, a common tool used in the theft of banking credentials. The phony security applications were first observed earlier this month, and newer versions have continued to appear, according to Kaspersky. "On the 4th of June, 2012, we found 3 APK files of ~207 kb in size each heuristically detected by our engine as HEUR:Trojan-Spy.AndroidOS.Zitmo.a. All these applications are malicious and were created to steal incoming SMS messages from infected devices. SMS messages will be uploaded to a remote server whose URL is encrypted and stored inside the body of the Trojan," blogged Denis Maslennikov, Researcher, Kaspersky. Joji Hamada, threat analyst, Symantec Security Response, blogged, "While there are countless numbers of sites aimed at scamming computer users, there have only b...

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE   The research conducted by Kaspersky Lab experts on the discovery of the Flame malware in May 2012 has revealed that the most complex cyberweapon to date. At the time of its discovery, there was no strong evidence of Flame being developed by the same team that delivered Stuxnet and Duqu. The earliest known version of Stuxnet, contains a special module known as “Resource 207”. In the subsequent 2010 version of Stuxnet, this module was completely removed. The "Resource 207" module is an encrypted DLL file and it contains an executable file that's the size of 351,768 bytes with the name "atmpsvcn.ocx". This particular file, as it is now revealed by Kaspersky Lab's investigation, has a lot in common with the code used in Flame. The list of striking resemblances includes the names of mutually exclusive objects, the algorithm used to decrypt strings, and the similar approaches to file naming. Alexander ...

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE HP has introduced its HP Lab-in-Box to Vidyanagar Primary School students in Ahmedabad. A self-sustainable and fully operational computer lab created in a shipping container, the HP Lab-in-Box is designed as a rapidly deployable cloud enabled infrastructure solution to spread both the reach and quality of education in India. This is the fourth such HP Lab-in-Box prototype that has been installed to facilitate personalized and immersive learning experiences. HP is also hosting a cloud-based educational application that searches and displays relevant videos from the internet, based on the textbook being read by the student. The application has an adaptive online self-learning tool called MindSpark from Educational Initiatives, an HP partner, who is providing personalized assessment tools to the student to track their individual learning progress. Jaijit Bhattacharya, Director, Government Affairs, HP India, said, "Today, there is a shortfa...

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE With the IPL craze kicked in, Kaspersky Lab brings yet another reason to celebrate. Buy and activate a Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 or Kaspersky Antivirus 2012 or Kaspersky PURE pack between1st April 2012 to 15th May 2012. Register on the microsite and get to meet and play a Virus Busting game with the Master Blaster himself, on winning the lucky draw. Jagannath Patnaik, Director- Channel Sales, Kaspersky Lab, South Asia said, "Ours is a cricket-driven nation and millions of people religiously follow the IPL series. Kaspersky Lab's 'Meet the Master' programme will provide our customers who are die-hard fans of Sachin Tendulkar, with an opportunity they would cherish for a lifetime. Also, we shall be running radio campaigns across the nation in leading radio stations to promote this offer." "We believe this activity will also further boost IT retail channel confidence in Kaspersky Lab products," said Ravi L...

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE Kaspersky Lab Expert Stefan Ortloff has announced a report. He said that last September, in partnership with Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), SurfNET and Kyrus Tech, Inc., Kaspersky Lab successfully disabled the dangerous Hlux/Kelihos botnet by sinkholing the infected machines to a host under our control. A few months later, our researchers stumbled upon a new version of the malware with significant changes in the communication protocol and new "features" like flash-drive infection, bitcoin-mining wallet theft. Now, we are pleased to announce that we have partnered with the CrowdStrike Intelligence Team, the Honeynet Project and Dell SecureWorks to disable this new botnet. Last week, we set up worldwide distributed machines for this sinkholing operation and on Wednesday, March 21, we finally began the synchronized propagation of our sinkhole IP-adress to the peer-to-peer network. After a short time, our sinkhole-machine i...

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE Kaspersky Lab has conducted its first South Asia Distributor Meet in Mumbai. The meet was attended by Kaspersky Lab’s retail and enterprise distributors from India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Kaspersky Lab was represented by Harry Cheung, Managing Director, APAC, Altaf Halde, Managing Director, South Asia, and Jagannath Patnaik, Channel Sales Director. The meet aimed at outlining the business roadmap for Kaspersky Lab in South Asia for 2012. Harry Cheung said, "Today, we are a strong player in the security marketplace in South Asia, including India. Among all regions under Kaspersky Lab - APAC, South Asia region has experienced maximum growth in 2011 and we look at continuing the momentum." Altaf Halde said, "We discussed new products to be introduced, the corporate roadmap and marketing initiatives that we could run in the respective South Asia territory markets to continue experiencing high growth." For More Detai...

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE Kaspersky Lab, Senior Spam Analyst has announced St. Valentine's Day. Year in, year out, it is becoming more and more of a reason for spammers to get to work. Users start receiving spam mail-outs offering presents for the romantic occasion in January since spammers want whole six weeks to reap the benefits of this yearly occasion. The newest of such "attractors" in the spammer world has become the word "coupon". This is often simply substituted for the word "discounts", attracting attention to goods or services. But there is another way to promote goods and services via "coupon spam": companies put their offerings on a coupon service and then via spam advertise them to try and reach a bigger audience. Nevertheless, it would appear several firms reckon this method of attracting attention is worthwhile: the first St. Valentine's spam mail-out, which Kaspersky Lab detected earlier this year, was ...

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE According to Kaspersky Security Network data, over the last three months Trojan bankers have been detected on an average of 2000 unique users' computers every day. Moreover, 780 signatures for new malicious programs that target sensitive financial information are added to Kaspersky Lab's antivirus database on a daily basis - that is 1.1% of the total number of malware detected every day by the company's software. Notably, in January Kaspersky Lab experts discovered Trojan-Banker.MSIL.MultiPhishing.gen which is designed to steal account details from clients of numerous banks including Santander, HSBC Bank UK, Metro Bank, Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB, and Barclays. After launching, the Trojan waits for an online banking service to start running. It then opens a window that imitates an authorization form for the respective bank. Interestingly, the Trojan allows no mistakes, checking the accuracy of the data that is entered. The frau...

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE Kaspersky Lab has reported a new phishing attack on Facebook that uses hijacked accounts to pose as the social network's security team and trick users into divulging credit card numbers. David Jacoby, Security Expert, Kaspersky Lab, said, 'The latest scam is unique because it doesn't just try to get Facebook users to click on a link to a malicious Web site. The attackers also use the stolen information to log into the person's account and swap the profile picture with a Facebook logo and change the name to 'FacebookSecurity'." Once the account is compromised, it is used to send out a message to all contacts, warning them that someone has reported a problem with their accounts and they will be turned off unless reconfirmed by the accountholder. Within the message is a link that takes victims to a Web sited dressed to look very similar to a Facebook page. Once on the Web site, the cybercriminals ask for name, e-mai...

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE Kaspersky Lab has announced the publication of its spam report for December 2011. The last month of the year was predictably quiet as compared to November the share of spam in email traffic fell 4.4 percentage points and averaged 76.2% for the month. Maria Namestnikova, Senior Spam Analyst, Kaspersky Lab shared, "We still have not detected any malicious attachments disguised as coupons, although we expect that these will show up in spam sooner or later. Anything and everything that is in demand on the Internet is eventually added to the spammers' arsenals in one way or another. Primarily, new approaches are typically used by the participants of affiliate programs that send out spam advertising medications and replicas of luxury goods. They are later joined by distributors of malicious code." Malicious files were detected in 4% of all email traffic in December, which was an increase of 1 percentage point compared to November...

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE Kaspersky Lab has highlighted the Top 10 IT Security stories of 2011. Costin Raiu, Director - Kaspersky Lab's Global Research & Analysis Team shares his research on the same. Costin Raiu said, "With 2011 coming to its end, it makes sense to sit back and take a look at what's been happening over the past 12 months in the IT Security world. If we had to summarize the year in a single word, I think it would have to be 'explosive.' The multitude of incidents, stories, facts, new trends and intriguing actors is so big that it makes it very hard to come up with a Top-10 of security stories of 2011. What I was aiming for with this list was to remember the stories that also indicated major trends or the emergence of new major actors on the security scene. By looking at these stories, we can get an idea of what will happen in 2012." The top 10 stories includes: The Rise of "Hacktivism"; The HBGary Federal Hack;...

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE Kaspersky Lab has announced its "Cyber Threat Forecast for 2012", where the company details its predictions for the year ahead. According to experts at Kaspersky Lab, governments and large corporations all over the world should be wary of a growing cyber menace in 2012. Not only will there be a dramatic increase in the number of targeted attacks on state institutions and large companies, it is also likely that a wider range of organizations will bear the brunt of the expected onslaught. The Kaspersky Lab forecast goes on to state that hacktivist attacks on state organizations and businesses will continue in 2012 and will have a predominantly political agenda. Alexander Gostev believes this will be an important trend when compared to similar attacks in 2011. However, hacktivism could well be used as a diversionary tactic to conceal other types of attacks. In terms of mobile threats in 2012, Kaspersky Lab expects to see Google Androi...

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE IBM has launched its Airport Solutions Lab in New Delhi, center in the Asia-Pacific region. Co-located with IBM's Research and India Industry Solutions labs, the Airport Solutions Lab will be a center to showcase IBM's novel technology innovations and solutions for airports and airlines. The Airport Solutions Lab will host technical and subject-matter experts who will help customers witness and understand the various airport solutions that are offered by IBM. The lab will enable customers to have access to solutions on a wide range of areas such energy management, asset management, space management, airport operations management and security management, among others. As a regional hub, the lab will cater to airports across the entire Asia-Pacific region. Daniel O'Connell, Vice-President, Distribution Sector, IBM Growth Markets, said, "Airports are fast becoming multi-modal transportation hubs and centers for economic vitali...

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE Kaspersky Lab has designed a special offer christened "Republic Day Bonanza" to reward its channel partners, this season. According to this buy-and-fly scheme, the purchase of Rs.4 lakh worth of Kaspersky Retail products from the platinum partners gives the buyer a chance to fly to Bangkok. This scheme is from the platinum partners. The scheme is applicable for the Retail products (KIS, KAV and KSOS) products purchased from the registered platinum partners of the region. The platinum partners list can be obtained from Kaspersky lab channel managers or Sakri IT solutions channel Managers. Jagannath Patnaik said, "We want to share our success and reward our channel partners, who have played a pivotal role towards bringing Kaspersky Lab, India on the growth path." He further added, "This special offer has been designed to benefit our secondary level partners and we invite them to take active part in the scheme and give ...