Russian security professionals Eugene and Natalya Kaspersky dropped by Network World this week en route from Moscow to the RSA Conference in California. In a wide-ranging interview with Features Editor Neal Weinberg, the Kaspersky Lab duo discussed the Russian mafia, the latest in hacker tricks and their view that the bad guys are winning.

If you want to read the full interview follow this link: http://www.networks asia.net/ ena/article/ articleDetail. jsp?id=402460

Microsoft and three other security vendors have been slammed by security company, Virus Bulletin, for not ”having their (Vista anti-virus) products right by now”. 

Windows Live OneCare not up to scratch

Microsoft’s much-hyped anti-virus solution, Live OneCare, as well as McAfee’s VirusScan Enterprise, G DATA’s AntiVirusKit 2007, and Norman’s VirusControl all failed to pass a series of tests that are required to achieve the company’s VB100 certification.

“With the number of delays that we’ve seen in Vista’s release, there’s no excuse for security vendors not to have got their products right by now,’ said John Hawes, technical consultant at Virus Bulletin.

In Virus Bulletin’s VB100 tests, each anti-virus product is pitted against a set of viruses from the WildList, a publicly available up-to-date list of the currently circulating viruses.

To earn VB100 certification, products must be able to detect 100% of the viruses contained in the WildList test set and must not generate any false alarms when scanning a set of clean files.

While Hawes admitted that security improvements have been made to Vista, he said that Vista was still not able to fend off malware without help from additional security products.

Anti-virus software from CA, Fortinet, F-Secure, Kaspersky, Sophos and Symantec successfully achieved VB100 certification. 

Microsoft has promised to improve Live OneCare.

Some very enlightening internal Microsoft emails are now made public. Emails to and from Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Jim Allchin, etc all make for some mind blowing reading. One of my favorites is from Jim Allchin to Bill Gates, entitled 'losing our way,' in which Allchin states 'I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.

The man responsible for unleashing what is believed to be the first self-propagating cross-site scripting worm has pleaded guilty in Los Angeles Superior Court to charges stemming from his most infamous hacking.

It seems that phishing is becoming more popular than malware these days... a new study in January 2007 shows that one in 93.3 (1.07 per cent) emails comprised some form of phishing attack, according to security mail services vendor MessageLabs. There were fewer emails infected with viruses: one in 119.9 emails, or 0.83 per cent.

 

The difference in the ratio of phishing to virus attacks is partly due to virus attacks becoming more targeted and no longer occurring as one large outbreak. This includes the recent Storm Worm and Warezov attacks, according to MessageLabs.

 

You could find the full story here: http://software.silicon.com/malware/0,3800003100,39165550,00.htm