Software News – netfordownload.com

ZoneAlarm updates Extreme Security suite to handle new kinds of threats

About 10 million Americans were victims of identity theft last year, about 22 percent more than the year before. Those are always good numbers to trot out when you’re introducing a new security software suite.

Check Point’s Zone Alarm division is refreshing its Zone Alarm Extreme Security Suite today. The software has more than a dozen components aimed at protecting users from viruses, identity theft, spyware and all sorts of other malware. The changes to this year’s software reflect the evolving nature of threats.

extremeCheck Point Software Technologies, a publicly traded software firm, bought Zone Alarm six years ago. Back then, the company had firewall software that offered basic protection for a computer. This year’s firewall offers 90 percent fewer alerts — meaning it raises fewer false alarms — than last year’s. Zone Alarm now protects more than 60 million computers. But a firewall isn’t enough anymore.

With so many different things to protect against, security software companies are moving to layered defenses. Some of them block threats automatically, while some have to detect patterns of behavior and then act based on the likelihood of a threat or a false alarm. The basic antivirus software protects your email against known threats such as Conficker. Firewalls block malicious programs while allowing authorized communications.

But that’s not enough. While emails once delivered most of the threats, now you can get infections just by going to the wrong web sites. A virus dubbed Gumblar appeared in February that can attach itself to Adobe PDF files and infect a machine upon being downloaded. You don’t have to click on an email or do anything at all.

ZoneAlarm has virtualization software to deal with such attacks. It can create an independent partition within your computer’s hard drive and place suspicious files in it. If a download is not authorized by a user and happens automatically, ZoneAlarm’s Force Field software places it in a partition where it can be isolated. ZoneAlarm has also added “advanced download protection.” That screens user-approved downloads and isolates them. It checks against its own records and then offers advice on whether to warn the user or not.

(more…)

New virus infects programs built with Delphi

Researchers said on Tuesday that they are seeing something unusual in the malware world–a virus that targets a development environment.

The virus, dubbed Win32.Induc, was written to infect applications built with Delphi, according to Nick Bilogorskiy, manager of antivirus researcher at Sonicwall. Delphi is used to write Windows programs, including database applications.

When an infected program is run on a machine running Delphi, the virus infects any software that gets compiled on that machine. The virus spreads the executable file of itself as well as the source code. It looks for a compiler on the infected system and re-compiles the source code, inserting its code into any programs compiled on the system.

“This malware just spreads; it doesn’t delete files or do anything malicious,” he said. “But if you create software and you have this code in it, the software will be blocked by antivirus (technology).”

(more…)