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http://www.un.org "Welcome to the United Nations: It's Your World" # Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=33849 UN joins forces with computer giants to tackle Internet terrorism 22 February 2010 – The United Nations and computer giants, including Microsoft and Google, are joining forces to identify ways to combat terrorists’ use of the Internet to recruit members, organize criminal acts and raise money. The UN Working Group on Countering the Use of the Internet for Terrorist Purposes is holding talks with CISCO, Symantec and others in the United States city of Seattle to examine the technical issues involved in...

US Government recommends weighing laptop before and after each visit. Senior executives in US IT companies have been advised by the US Government to follow extremely strict policies for visits to China which extend far beyond standard software protection. The policies encourage them to leave their standard IT equipment at home and to buy separate gear only for use in China. Mark Bregman, chief technology officer at security firm Symantec said he left his MacBook Pro behind in the US and took his MacBook Air whenever he flew to China. Bregman said he only ever used the Air in China...

BOSTON (Reuters) - A malicious software program known as Conficker that many feared would wreak havoc on April 1 is slowly being activated, weeks after being dismissed as a false alarm, security experts said. Conficker, also known as Downadup or Kido, is quietly turning thousands of personal computers into servers of e-mail spam and installing spyware, they said. The worm started spreading late last year, infecting millions of computers and turning them into "slaves" that respond to commands sent from a remote server that effectively controls an army of computers known as a botnet. Its unidentified creators started using those...

"What is PIFTS.exe?" or How Symantec Turned A Simple Mistake Into Corporate Disaster.First posted: March 9, 2009Updated: March 10, 2009 On March 9, 2009, Norton Internet Security users around the world encountered a suspicious message which indicated that an unsigned program, PIFTS.exe, was trying to connect to the Internet. Users quickly turned to Google where they only found other users looking for the same answers. Next they began posting questions on the official Norton Internet Security message board. Here is where the situation quickly deteriorated. Forum moderators began pulling every single post which mentioned PIFTS or merely alluded to...

Software company president John Thompson is the top candidate for U.S. commerce secretary, a senior Democratic official confirmed to FOX News. If chosen, Thompson, chairman and chief executive of Symantec Corp, would fill the last slot in President Obama's Cabinet. The Democratic official told FOX News that it is not clear when an announcement will happen, but the official believes it will come soon, suggesting it could be used as a catalyst to move Obama's economic recovery plan. At a White House briefing Tuesday, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thompson is just one of the names under consideration and that...

The theory is now a reality. Symantec reported Tuesday that drive-by pharming, in which a hacker changes the DNS settings on a customer’s broadband router or wireless access point and directs the link to a fraudulent Web site, has been observed in the wild. The first drive-by pharming attack has been observed against a Mexican bank: “It’s associated with an e-mail pretending to be from a legitimate Spanish-language e-greeting card company, Gusanito.com,” says Symantec Security Response principal researcher Zulfikar Ramzan. Inside the e-mail is an HTML image tag but instead of displaying images, it sends a request to the home...

Excerpts - NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- A disgruntled hacker with a personal grudge against Symantec, which provides anti-virus software to leading Fortune 500 companies, could be behind a new, crippling computer virus that's already hit a division of at least one big U.S. corporation on Thursday. If it spreads, technology experts warn the latest strains of the insidious RINBOT computer virus could hijack network systems of businesses worldwide. ~ snip ~ Cluley said this strain appears to be hitting MS SQL servers. It looks for networks that run the Microsoft Windows operating system, including Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98,...

My computer used to be really zippy. 1 1/4 gig Ram, fast processor, etc. But then I installed symantic and that slowed it somewhat. Then all the Windows updates. Now it's actually pretty slow, sometimes. Anyone else have this problem?

SAN FRANCISCO - A computer worm is attacking some business PCs through a flaw in antivirus software by Symantec Corp., a security company warned Friday. EEye Digital Security, based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., said the worm, dubbed "Big Yellow," began attacking some computer systems on Thursday — seven months after eEye first discovered the flaw. Symantec released a patch to address the flaw in May, but it's up to its corporate customers to install it. Officials at the Cupertino, Calif.-based security software company said Friday it had so far received three reports of systems affected by the worm. "It is...

As Apple's Mac OS X operating system increases in popularity, so does its exposure to internet-related security threats. Security firm Symantec has published its latest Internet Security Threat Report, revealing that the number of vulnerabilities identified in Apple's Safari Web browser doubled over the first half of 2006, and that the amount of time Safari users were vulnerable to exploits before Apple released a security fix increased from zero days to five. During the first six months of 2006 malicious users discovered 12 bugs in Safari, 47 bugs in Mozilla Firefox, and 38 bugs in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Mozilla on...

Two U.S. software firms are asking the European Commission to take action against Microsoft's new Vista operating system, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Adobe Systems has told EU regulators that Microsoft should be banned from incorporating free competing software for reading and creating electronic documents with Vista, the paper said, quoting people familiar with the situation. Antivirus software maker Symantec will send officials to Brussels, Belgium, next week to brief journalists about features of Vista that it says will undercut rival makers of computer security software, the paper said. Symantec confirmed on Thursday that two executives would travel...

Recently, I overheard an IT professional complaining about her users. Veronica's company has 300 employees, many of whom would have been called "paper pushers" in an earlier era. Some of those employees download software and install it on their computers, and it often causes havoc for the support staff. Veronica's specific rant was about screensavers (some of which carry a payload of spyware, making it a security issue as well as a support problem), but it could have been any sort of application. Veronica had looked at a $10,000 hardware solution, but even that required 10 hours a week for...

The networking technology underpinning Windows Vista may be less stable on release that that behind Windows XP, according to an analysis by security firm Symantec. Microsoft has re-written its networking stack for Windows Vista in order to allow for "easier maintenance, improved performance, and improved stability". But an analysis by security researchers at Symantec found a variety of security flaws with early builds of the OS. In a white paper based on this research, Windows Vista Network Attack Surface Analysis: A Broad Overview (PDF), the researchers conclude that Vista may be less stable, at least for the immediate future, than...

I am always puzzled when I hear people say things like, "Mid-cap energy stocks look attractive," or "Investors should avoid REITs right now." Perhaps it is the case that every mid-cap energy stock is undervalued, and every REIT is overvalued, but that is an extremely unlikely scenario. Instead of making sweeping statements, I am much more interested finding undervalued stocks, regardless of whether the company is classified as health care, industrial, large cap, or small cap. However, in my search for stocks for the Morningstar GrowthInvestor newsletter, I have noticed an interesting pattern: Many high-quality technology stocks are selling at...

A gaping security flaw in the latest versions of Symantec's anti-virus software suite could put millions of users at risk of a debilitating worm attack, Internet security experts warned May 25. Researchers at eEye Digital Security, the company that discovered the flaw, said it could be exploited by remote hackers to take complete control of the target machine "without any user action." "This is definitely wormable. Once exploited, you get a command shell that gives you complete access to the machine. You can remove, edit or destroy files at will," said eEye Digital Security spokesperson Mike Puterbaugh.

WASHINGTON -- Symantec Corp.'s leading antivirus software, which protects some of the world's largest corporations and U.S. government agencies, suffers from a flaw that lets hackers seize control of computers to steal sensitive data, delete files or implant malicious programs, researchers said Thursday.

Symantec has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, accusing the software giant of misusing its intellectual property. The suit, filed on Thursday in Seattle, also claims that Microsoft violated a 1996 licensing agreement for Symantec's Volume Manager storage technology. Symantec is seeking an unspecified amount of damages as well as an injunction barring Microsoft from using the technology. If the injunction is granted, it could block the sale of Redmond's next-generation operating system, Windows Vista. "Our suit was filed as a last resort to protect our intellectual property that was misappropriated by Microsoft," said Chris Paden, a Symantec spokesperson, in a...

It doesn't appear that Symantec CEO John Thompson's next computer will run Windows. "We think more people ought to buy them," Thompson said of Apple's Macintosh computers, in response to a question from the audience at the Future in Review conference on Monday. The "target-rich" environment created by Windows vulnerabilities means that virus writers and hackers have set their sights on Windows PCs, he said. However, Thompson noted that if more and more people did go out and buy Macs, virus writers might change their tactics. And many attacks are increasingly of the phishing or identity theft variety, which targets...

SAN FRANCISCO--Symantec will fight off Microsoft's security software challenge by being better at coming up with new ideas, the company's CEO said Monday. John Thompson vowed that it would put more resources into research and development over the coming the year, speaking to reporters at the Symantec's annual Vision conference here. "Our strategy is to out-innovate Microsoft. We know more about security than they ever will," Thompson said. Microsoft's development of security products for its upcoming Vista update to the Windows operating system prompted Symantec to be bullish about taking on the software giant. "Competition with Microsoft is inevitable, given...

Into the Valley Anyone gullible enough to believe vendor press releases would wonder why Cassatt even exists. It's a software start-up trying to compete in a server virtualization market dominated by the likes of IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems. And, in fact, these massive companies have already solved the virtualization problem, according to the last three years of their marketing material. Customers actually trying to improve their data center management situation don't buy this hype. They've watched HP kill off the Utility Data Center project after billing it as the clear future of computing. They've also seen Sun Microsystems do...

LOS ANGELES (Dow Jones) -- Symantec Corp. said late Monday it has received notice from the Internal Revenue Service claiming that it owes $1 billion in additional taxes, mostly related to Veritas Software Corp., the storage-software firm it acquired for more than $10 billion last July. ~ snip ~

Microsoft has corrected a mistake in its anti-spyware product that flagged some Symantec security tools as malicious software. The problem occurred after Microsoft pushed out an update for Windows AntiSpyware last Thursday night. The updated software identified a Windows registry key set by the Symantec products as belonging to password stealing malicious software known as Bancos, Microsoft and Symantec said in a joint statement Monday. On detection of the registry keys, Windows AntiSpyware alerted the user and suggested deletion of the keys. "The deletion of these registry keys will cause all versions of the SAV (Symantec AntiVirus) and SCS (Symantec...

A critical software bug has been discovered in several of the most widely used anti-virus programs. It could be exploited to take control of a computer or to steal information, according to an analysis produced by the independent security analyst who made the discovery. The glitch affects 39 different Symantec products - including both home and enterprise versions of its anti-virus software. It resides within the Symantec anti-virus library, which is used by all of the packages. The analyst, Alex Wheeler, discovered that a critical error occurs when the Symantec anti-virus library decompresses files from "RAR" format for analysis Symantec...

Mac users are “operating under a false sense of security”, according to Symantec, and Firefox users will have to recognize that the open-source browser is currently a greater security risk than Internet Explorer. Symantec’s latest Internet Security Threat Report, published Monday, found evidence that attackers are beginning to organize for attacks on the Mac operating system. Researchers also found that over the past six months, nearly twice as many vulnerabilities surfaced in Mozilla browsers as in Explorer. “It is now clear that the Mac OS is increasingly becoming a target for the malicious activity, contrary to popular belief that the...

I manage a conservative web site in the UK known as SterlingTimes (not dissimilar to FreeRepublic). The site has been blocked by a content filter owned by an American corporation known as Symantec. The content filter is known as "Parental Control". Does any one know the process by which an American corporation can assign as British conservative message board as "intolerant"? http://www.sterlingtimes.com

While Windows and other Microsoft Corp. products are the favorite targets of hackers, the malicious code writers are increasingly targeting software that run on other operating systems, including Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac and open-source Linux, a security research group said Monday. In its list of the top 20 most critical Internet vulnerabilities in the first quarter of the year, the Sans Institute reported that software fixes were released for flaws in RealNetworks Inc.'s RealOne Player and RealPlayer. Security flaws were found in versions of the multimedia players running on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. In addition, vulnerabilities were listed for...

Symantec has reported glitches in its antivirus software that could allow hackers to launch denial-of-service attacks on computers running the applications. In a notice posted on its Web site this week, Symantec detailed two similar vulnerabilities found in its Norton AntiVirus software, which is sold on its own or bundled in Norton Internet Security and Norton System Works. The flaws, which could lead to computers crashing or slowing severely if attacked, are limited to versions of the software released for 2004 and 2005. The Information-Technology Promotion Agency of Japan, a government-affiliated tech watchdog group, identified the first instance of the...

Crackers are using a security vulnerability in Symantec's enterprise products to redirect surfers to websites hosting malicious code. The main vector of the DNS cache poisoning attack, detected by the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Centre on 4 March, has been traced back to a vulnerability affecting Symantec firewalls with DNS caching. Symantec has issued a hotfix for its Symantec Enterprise Firewall and Enterprise Security Gateway appliance products. Even users who applied a July 2004 fix to correct a previous DNS cache poisoning problem are advised to revisit the issue. A few non-Symantec users reported similar issues, so the problem is...

A Fatal Blow to Shrinkwrap Licensing? By Ed Foster, Section Columns Posted on Mon Dec 20th, 2004 at 08:02:57 AM PDT In January 2003, California resident Cathy Baker walked into her local CompUSA store to return copies of Windows XP and Norton AntiVirus she'd purchased there. When trying to install the programs, she had of course been confronted by all the obnoxious terms in the Windows and NAV End User License Agreements. Instead of clicking OK, she took them back to the store for a refund, as the EULAs said she was supposed to do if she refused to...

Chris Kleponis/Bloomberg NewsJohn W. Thompson, chief of Symantec, will lead the merged company. Analysts say his I.B.M. background gives him a good perspective. ARTICLE TOOLS E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Format Most E-Mailed Articles Reprints & Permissions TIMES NEWS TRACKER   Topics Alerts Symantec Corporation Veritas Software Corporation Mergers, Acquisitions and Divestitures Computers and the Internet Track news that interests you. AN FRANCISCO, Dec. 16 - The Symantec Corporation, a leader in security software and one of Silicon Valley's oldest companies, announced early Thursday that it would acquire Veritas Software, a maker of data storage programs, to create the world's fourth-largest...

Norton Internet Security has blocked access to this restricted site. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Site: http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/latest?ao=1 Blocked categories: Crime If you think this web site is incorrectly categorized, visit the Symantec Internet Security Center to report it.

Early this month, several Web sites began offering software promising ringtones and screensavers for certain cell phones. But those who downloaded the software found that it turned every icon on their cell phones' screens into a skull-and-crossbones and disabled their phones, so they could no longer send or receive text messages or access contact lists or calendars. Security experts named the malicious software "Skulls" and consider it an early warning of the damage hackers could do as they turn their malevolent talents to cell phones from computers. "Hackers are simply trying to put it out there that it can be...

INTERNET FILTER SOFTWARE BLOCKS PRO-GUN SITES The Internet is a great asset that provides us with once unimaginable amounts of information. But, of course, not all information is deemed appropriate, and many parents depend on Internet filter software to block sites they feel are inappropriate for their children. One such software program is Internet Security from Symantec Corp. NRA members have discovered that after installing this software on their computers they can no longer visit NRA sites such as www.NRAILA.org. A Symantec corporate official contacted by ILA staff explained that if certain broad categories are selected to filter, it will...

WASHINGTON - The government's cybersecurity chief has abruptly resigned after one year with the Department of Homeland Security, confiding to industry colleagues his frustration over what he considers a lack of attention paid to computer security issues within the agency. Amit Yoran, a former software executive from Symantec Corp., informed the White House about his plans to quit as director of the National Cyber Security Division and made his resignation effective at the end of Thursday, effectively giving a single's day notice of his intentions to leave. Yoran said Friday he "felt the timing was right to pursue other opportunities."...

Symantec has labelled a program that enables Chinese surfers to view blocked websites as a Trojan Horse. Upshot? Users of Norton Anti-Virus cannot access Freegate, a popular program which circumvents government blocks, the FT reports. Freegate has 200,000 users, Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), its developer, estimates. It lets users view sites banned by the Chinese government by taking advantage of a range of proxy servers assigned to changeable internet addresses. But a recent update to Symantec's AV definition files means the latest version of Freegate is treated as malware and removed from systems protected by Norton. Short of disabling Norton...

Last night attempted to download Symantec/NortonAV LiveUpdate fixes and patches in preparation for SP2 loading. There were also some goofy popups from the Norton which are usually fixed with update downloads. Tried 3 times last evening (9:30 CDT-11:00 CDT) and three times this AM to get the download. Couldn't. The page would not open and the my 'incoming' monitor said that the site was not transmitting. Maybe they didn't figure all 10 million Windoze users would hit the site at once, huh?

SPARTANBURG, SC (Talon News) -- A threatening new e-mail virus debuted last Friday and is quickly circulating worldwide across the Internet, affecting computers of countless numbers of individuals, government officials, and media. In a message entitled "{Spam?} {Virus?} {Spam?} Check this out kid!!!," the e-mail simply states, "Send me back bro, when you'll be done...(if you know what i mean...) See ya, ..." Worse yet, the attachment to this e-mail, "jennifer the wild girl xxx07.jpg.pif," is a virus that has severely infected computers internationally. The virus, known as Worm.Zafi.B, sends as many as 100 or more e-mail messages daily with...

As my Norton Antivirus protection is expiring soon, I wanted to get the latest with regard to the fact that their "net nanny" internet "security" software by default screens out pro 2nd Amendment, Pro Gun webites while leaving anti gun sites alone. I went to their website looking for an email address to write to but all they have is a web form so I don't have the original message I sent. But here is their reply; Hello Mr. BattleFlag, The Parental Control feature in Norton Internet Security is a tool that parents can use to make choices about the...

Blaster, Slammer, Sobig, Lovsan - if these words are familiar to you, you might have been one of this year's victims of various and vicious PC security attacks. Just Friday, appropriately enough on Halloween, yet another monster reared its ugly head as computer security experts warned of a potentially troublesome new e-mail worm, Mimail.C, slowly spreading among both corporate and home e-mail users. This latest threat is a variant of the W32.Mimail worm that surfaced in August and comes as an e-mail message with "our private photos" in the subject line and an attached .zip archive file called "photos.zip." Infection...

Due to an increase in submissions, Symantec Security Response has upgraded W32.Swen.A@mm to Category 3, as of 6:30pm Thursday, September 18, 2003. W32.Swen.A@mm is a mass-mailing worm that attempts to spread through file-sharing networks, such as KaZaA and IRC, and attempts to kill antivirus and personal firewall programs running on a computer. The worm arrives as an email attachment. The subject, body, and From: address of the email may vary. Some examples claim to be patches for Microsoft Internet Explorer, or delivery failure notices from qmail. W32.Swen.A@mm is similar to W32.Gibe.B@mm in function, and is written in C++. Also Known...

<p>The Bush administration on Monday selected Amit Yoran, a respected software executive from Symantec Corp., as the nation's new cybersecurity chief inside the Department of Homeland Security.</p> <p>Yoran, who is hardly a household name but well known within the cybersecurity community, will be the government's evangelist for convincing Americans to improve their computer defenses against hackers, disgruntled employees, commercial rivals and foreign governments.</p>