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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...