With the release of the summer blockbuster Star Trek: Into Darkness, I started thinking about the Star Trek universe, Trek-nology, and what it would be like if avast! Antivirus was adopted by Starfleet. Wouldn’t it be amusing to hear the voice of the computer echoing through the bridge, “avast! Virus Database has been updated”? As Captain Picard would say, “Make it so!”

Our beloved U.S.S. Enterprise, space station Deep Space 9, the far-flung Voyager, and even the sentient android Data experienced computer malfunctions, some of them caused by a virus. Here are a few episodes that come to mind as I imagine the possibility of avast! in the Final Frontier.

ST: TNG The Contagion

Captain Jean-Luc Picard is a student of archaeology. When a distress call comes in from the U.S.S. Yamato, engaged in an archeological investigation looking for the legendary planet Iconia, the Enterprise responds right away. But not in time to save the 1000+ crew and ship from destruction due to a computer virus. The weaponized virus was transmitted by a scan from an Iconian probe and caused dangerous systems failures by overwriting software. The Enterprise becomes infected when it downloads the Yamato logs. During the investigation, a Romulan Warbird shows up and an interstellar incident becomes imminent.

Shields up!

Apparently Starfleet’s ships don’t come equipped with virus protection software because the Yamato was destroyed when hostile, malicious threats took over their computer system, and the Enterprise was threatened as well. Avast’s shields protect different aspects of computer functions. If anything suspicious is detected, the file system shield will prevent the program from being started or the file from being opened to prevent any damage being caused to your computer and data.

Read more…

Source: http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/

“In the cross hairs of anonymous”

The hacktivist group Anonymous announced phase one of a massive cyberattack, called Op USA,  on U.S government and banking websites scheduled for next Tuesday, May 7. The White House, the NSA, and the FBI are included on a list of high profile government targets, and 133 financial institutions including the Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citibank are listed as banking targets.

Communicating through Pastebin on April 21, an Anonymous spokesperson stated, “Anonymous will make sure that this May 7th will be a day to remember.” They wrote that the reason for the attack is “…multiple war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan…”.

Anonymous posted a list of targets and mapped out the method of attacks writing, “You can not stop the internet hate machine from doxes, DNS attacks, defaces, redirects, ddos attacks, database leaks, and admin take overs.” Read more…

A YouTube video called Movies vs. Life compares scenes embellished with movie magic to their real-life equivalents. We like to think that an avast! Antivirus cameo during a computer hacking scene (pay attention around 0:22 seconds) is one of the reasons that this hilarious video has gone viral.

A round of applause from avast! to French comedy troupe Golden Moustache for producing this funny video.

Make sure you turn on captions for the English subtitles.

Once you start using avast! Free Antivirus, you quickly realize what a quality product it is and want to share it with your family members and friends. We have created an easy way for you to recommend avast!, and at the same time earn points toward a free 1-year license of avast! Internet Security.

The steps are pretty easy.

First, you need a my.avast! account. If you don’t have an account it is simple to create one.  All you need is an email address or Facebook login. Go to https://my.avast.com to create yours now or open the avast! program and go to the “Recommend” tab.  I’ll tell you some benefits of having an account at the end of this post.

Once you have a my.avast! account, you can recommend avast! Free Antivirus using your very own special download link. Share this link with friends or family easily through your social networks or email.

Your special link will look similar to this one, http://www.avast.com/get/Hcwuc5aY

You can get your own link in two places:

1. Your my.avast account web page: https://my.avast.com/recommendation

2. The avast! user interface – Click on the avast! icon in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, then click the Recommend tab. It will look like this:

Once your friend installs avast! from your link and starts using it, a credit is counted toward your my.avast! account. When you reach 7 friends, you can download your free Internet Security license. If you have lots of friends, you can keep going – 14 friends, you get a 2-year license; 21 friends, you get a 3-year license.

Benefits of having a my.avast account

• You can register any avast! free product which you have installed and which requires registration
• You can remotely control your mobile devices on which avast! Mobile Security is installed
• You can track the basic data about all your connected devices (program/virus database version, activity log, etc.)

Thank you for using avast! Antivirus and recommending us to your friends and family. For all the latest news, fun and contest information, please follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Jeno (Jolli) – child survivor A7734 from Auschwitz, 4.5 years old at liberation. Born in 1940.

Seventy-three year old Menachem Bodner lost his twin brother Jeno (Jolli) 68 years ago when the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated.  He knows only one thing about his brother:  The Auschwitz ID number tattoed on his arm -  A 7734. With the help of his grandchildren and genealogist Ayana KimRon, Mr. Bodner is now using Facebook to aid in the search. When Mr. Bodner described his unlikely social media campaign he said, “I’m like a virus!  I will go viral and spread the message until I do find my brother.”

And that gave us, the most popular antivirus company in the world, an idea…

AVAST has 180 million users across the globe, and we speak to them every day in the form of our pop-up notification that tells of a virus database update. What if we could use our massive ability to crowd-source and help Mr. Bodner’s message “go viral” by telling our users about his search? Maybe, just maybe, someone among our 180 million users can provide a clue to Jeno’s fate.

Please follow the Facebook page dedicated to finding Mr. Bodner’s long-lost twin brother, A7734. If you have information that could help find Jeno, please share it there.

There is a nasty botnet trolling WordPress sites trying to log in with the default admin user name and using “brute-force” methods to crack the passwords. Our advice to save your wordpress blog from being hacked is to change admin as the login name to something else and use strong passwords.

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, advises the same thing on his blog. He also said to turn on the two-step authentication, which prompts you to enter a secret number you get from the Google Authenticator App on your smartphone. To make as secure an environment as you can, ensure that the latest version of WordPress is installed as well.

“Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99% of sites out there and probably never have a problem,” Mullenweg writes to assure 64 million WordPress users.

You could win 1 of 9 Nexus devices! All you have to do is visit the Android Police contest page and answer this question:

What feature (or features) would you like to see added to avast! Mobile Security?

Visit the Android Police contest page now, read through the description of the contest, and add your answer to the comments section. That’s it! You could win 1 of 9 Nexus devices! The contest begins now and will run for one week, ending on Saturday, April 20th at 12:00AM PT (Midnight). After that, winners will be picked randomly.

Enter now and share with your friends.

Learn more about avast! Mobile Security:

Avast welcomed students and professors from the School of Electrical Engineering at Czech Technical University in Prague to our headquarters on Tuesday, April 9. The visitors learned about Avast’s “freemium” business model from Martin Zima our Free Products Marketing Director, and heard 4 technical presentations ranging from “How we deal with large datasets” from Michal Augustýn, Senior Software Developer to an “Analyst’s Life – fighting cybercrime and having fun!” from two of our Malware Analysts, Martin Šmarda and Pavel Šrámek.

Thank you to all the students for your questions, open discussion and an active approach to many technical topics. And congratulations to Martin Burian who won a Google Nexus 7.

Already this year, we have hosted students working toward their MBA’s from Penn State University, Villanova University and the University of Alabama. If you are interested in visiting Avast headquarters next time you are in Prague, we would like to hear from you. Please leave a comment below.

Read more…

At Avast, we know how precious a good night’s sleep is. You can relax and sleep soundly knowing that avast! Antivirus is protecting your devices. From your family’s PCs or Macs to the Android phone in your pocket or tablet on your nightstand – avast! is guarding against prowlers, snoops, and thieves.

Check out the avast! Store for family-friendly offers on multiple device protection. And…Sweet Dreams!