Intel Security has released its McAfee Labs Threats Report: May 2015, which includes revelations on the rapid proliferation of new ransom-ware, HDD & SSD firmware attacks by the Equation Group computer espionage group and a major increase in malware targeting Adobe Flash multimedia software.

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In the first quarter of 2015, McAfee Labs registered a 165 percent increase in new ransom-ware driven largely by the new, hard-to-detect CTB-Locker ransom-ware family, a new ransom-ware family called Teslacrypt & the emergence of new versions of CryptoWall, TorrentLocker & BandarChor.

McAfee Labs attributes CTB-Locker’s success to clever techniques for evading security software, higher-quality phishing emails & an “affiliate” program that offers accomplices a percentage of ransom payments in return for flooding cyberspace with CTB-Locker phishing messages.

McAfee Labs suggests organizations and individuals make it a priority to learn how to recognize phishing emails, including the use of tools such as the Intel Security Phishing Quiz:  Phishing Quiz Link

The first quarter also saw new Adobe Flash malware samples increase by 317 percent,  researchers attribute the rise to several factors

  • The popularity of Adobe Flash as a technology; user delay in applying available Adobe Flash patches; new methods to exploit product vulnerabilities
  • A steep increase in the number of mobile devices that can play Adobe Flash files (.swf); and the difficulty of detecting some Adobe Flash exploits. Researchers are seeing a continued shift in focus among exploit kit developers, from Java archive and Microsoft Silverlight vulnerabilities to Adobe Flash vulnerabilities.

To fully leverage vendor efforts to address vulnerabilities, McAfee Labs urges organizations and individual users to be more diligent in keeping their products updated with the latest security patches.

What can HDD and SSD do

In February 2015, the cyber security community became aware of efforts by a secretive outfit called Equation Group to exploit HDD and SSD firmware. McAfee Labs assessed the reprogramming modules exposed in February and found that they could be used to reprogram the firmware in SSDs in addition to the previously-reported HDD reprogramming capability.

Once reprogrammed, the HDD and SSD firmware can reload associated malware each time infected systems boot and the malware persists even if the drives are reformatted or the operating system is reinstalled. Once infected, security software cannot detect the associated malware stored in a hidden area of the drive.

Detailed insights of McAfee Labs Threats Report[May 2015]

PC Malware Growth : The first quarter saw a slight decline in new PC malware, a development primarily due to the activity of one adware family, Soft Pulse, which spiked in Q4 2014 and returned to normal levels in Q1 2015. The McAfee Labs malware “zoo” grew 13 percent during that time, and now contains 400 million samples.

Mobile Malware :  The number of new mobile malware samples jumped by 49 percent from Q4 2014 to Q1 2015.

SSL-Attacks : SSL-related attacks continued in Q1 2015, although they tapered off in number relative to Q4 2014. This reduction is likely the result of SSL library updates that have eliminated many of the vulnerabilities exploited in prior quarters. Shellshock attacks are still quite prevalent since their emergence late last year.

Spam Botnets : The Dyre, Dridex and Darkmailer3.Slenfbot botnets overtook Festi and Darkmailer2 as the top spam networks; pushing pharmaceuticals, stolen credit cards & “shady” social-media marketing tools

McAfee Labs Threats Report: May 2015 can be downloaded from here

In the past, there have been several articles on this blog where we mentioned how important “Digital Media” has become to anyone’s business. Social Media is now playing an important role in “customer buying behavior” & customer-sentiment echoes about your brand and might affect “buying behavior of prospective customers”.

Social media marketing is hailed as one of the best ways to promote a start up. It is cheap, relatively easy and pretty effective in helping a company establish its own identity and brand. While there are certainly many benefits to social media marketing, truly benefiting from your efforts requires a certain level of skill and dedication. With the wrong approach, your social media presence could even harm your fledgling business.

How many times have we deleted an item from a cart on e-commerce websites after reading customer reviews or seller reviews etc ? Social Media has become an important tool for ensuring that you get repeat/new customers, solving customer pain-points & getting useful feedback from them. In a nutshell – “Listening to customers & Monitoring your brand on Social Media channels would directly/indirectly affect sales“. It is also a channel to WoW your customers 🙂

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In this article, we share some of the tips which would help your start-up in making most of Social Media & maximizing results in Monitoring.

Choose,Focus & Focus

Social Media has evolved rapidly due to which daily we see startups claiming to be the next Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. This indicates that there are options however, choosing the right platform for your brand & it’s nature of business [B2B or B2C] is of prime importance. It would be better to start small, listen, track and than spread your wings. If you are a startup dealing with Jewellery or any product dealing with aesthetics, than instagram is a great platform in which case, instagram analytics would be of prime importance.

Interact, Build relations & increase business

In many cases, the ultimate goal of social media marketing is to increase exposure, drive traffic and create leads. This leads to some misconceptions on how to use the platform. Simply promoting yourself everywhere you can will only find a small level of success. The true power in social media lies in building relationships, establishing authority & offering benefits to subscribers. Monitoring what is being said about your brand & interacting with your subscribers creates a very positive influence. Social Media monitoring tools like ThoughtBuzz can come in very handy in this case. The tool gives detailed analysis & insights into the reach, engagement hence, RoI for different social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc.

Monitor Influencers

Opening a social media account is just the first step for your startup. As a startup, there should be responsible, timely & active participation on the channel. A great way to do this is to find other relevant social media accounts, blogs, sites and services and mention them on your social media feeds. You need to identify the social media influencers – A i.e. identify relevant social media accounts, blogs & services and mention them on your social media feeds.

ThoughtBuzz has a good feature that helps you identify the “social media stalwarts” who matter the most for your brand based on the interactions of the fans with the community.

In a nutshell, Social Media cannot be ignored and at the same time, it needs to be monitored with the right set of tools. In this article, we have a look at ThoughtBuzz which suffices all our requirements.

ThoughtBuzz is an interactive social media management tool which has been launched by ThoughtBuzz, a Singapore based creative digital agency, with office in Delhi, Mumbai in India. We review the tool & mention some of the salient features which would make Social Media Management easier for professionals.

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Once we login to ThoughtBuzz it prompts you to enter details about the presence of the brand on different social media channels. Users have the options to add profiles for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. Once added, user can monitor them at periodic basis.

User Feed

The latest ThoughtBuzz interface focusses on “Real Time Communication” where it would give you real-time notifications on the latest user activities across your social profiles on Facebook and Twitter. This can help the brand manager to filter the important messages & also ensure that there is timely communication.

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Influencers identification & Content Insights

As mentioned before, “Influencers” are the one’s that matter the most for the brand. It could be a positive or negative sentiment that might be generated by the user on Social Media channels. But it becomes necessary to have key insights of your content available on people who are helping taking your content viral on these channels.

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Conclusion

Just to summarize, there is no special Mantra to achieve success on Social Media. Certain tactics might work for the competitors however, might not work for your startup. Identify the right hash tags, make timely announcements, identify the influencers & convert passive audience into active audience so that you get the most of your social media channels. At every point, use Social Media Monitoring tools to track & re-iterate your online strategy.

Image SourceWeb-Live.it

Zoho has launched Inbox Insight, a minimalist mobile app for Zoho Mail that works like a search engine for the inbox. Inbox Insight fetches and displays only relevant messages based on user search queries, rather than bring in a barrage of emails and then sort them, as mobile apps do today. The new app is available for both iOS and Android smartphones.

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Inbox Insight Highlights

Faster retrieval Inbox Insight presents a simple search box. Users specify criteria, like sender name, subject, attachments or date range. Inbox Insight whips out only relevant emails from the server.

Saved searches Users can save searches and enable push notifications, so they get notified when new emails match their search. Saved searches are also available when users get back on their web browsers.

Quick sorting Messages can be sorted quickly by simply swiping left to flag, label, archive or delete.

Learning algorithms With every use, Inbox Insight learns more about the user and offers suggestions that make searches even faster.

Inbox Insight works with Zoho Mail, the company’s business-focused email application that combines a clean, ad-free interface with powerful features geared for professional users. Zoho Mail is free for up to 25 mailboxes.

Pricing and Availability

Inbox Insight is free and available immediately for iOS and Android smartphones.

For more information on Inbox Insight, please visit the Official Zoho Page

Intel Security released its McAfee Labs Threats Report: February 2015, including assessments of the mobile threat landscape and the failure of mobile app developers to patch critical Secure Sockets Layer [SSL] vulnerabilities, potentially impacting millions of mobile phone users.  McAfee Labs also revealed details on the increasingly popular Angler exploit kit, and warned of increasingly aggressive Potentially Unwanted Programs [PUP’s] that change system settings & gather personal information without the knowledge of users.

McAfee Labs researchers found that mobile app providers have been slow to address the most basic SSL vulnerabilities: Improper digital certificate chain validation. In September 2014, the Computer Emergency Response Team [CERT] at Carnegie Mellon University released a list of mobile apps possessing this weakness, including apps with millions of downloads to their credit.

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In January, McAfee Labs tested the 25 most popular apps on CERT’s list of vulnerable mobile apps that send login credentials through insecure connections and found that 18 still have not been patched despite public disclosure, vendor notification, and, in some cases, multiple version updates addressing concerns other than security. McAfee Labs researchers simulated man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks that successfully intercepted information shared during supposedly secure SSL sessions. The vulnerable data included usernames and passwords and in some instances, login credentials from social networks and other third party services.

Although there is no evidence that these mobile apps have been exploited, the cumulative number of downloads for these apps ranges into the hundreds of millions. Given these numbers, McAfee Labs’ findings suggest that the choice by mobile app developers to not patch the SSL vulnerabilities has potentially put millions of users at risk of becoming targets of MITM attacks.

This crimeware package contains easy-to-use attack features and new capabilities such as file-less infection, virtual machine and security product evasion, and the ability to deliver a wide range of payloads including banking Trojans, rootkits, ransomware, CryptoLocker & backdoor Trojans.

Some of the highlights of the report are below:

Mobile Malware

McAfee Labs reported that mobile malware samples grew 14 percent during the fourth quarter of 2014, with Asia and Africa registering the highest infection rates. At least 8 percent of all McAfee-monitored mobile systems reported an infection in Q4 2014, with much of the activity being attributed to the AirPush ad network.

Potentially Unwanted Programs

In Q4, McAfee Labs detected PUPs on 91 million systems each day. McAfee Labs sees PUPs becoming more and more aggressive, posing as legitimate apps while performing unauthorized actions such as displaying unintended ads, modifying browser settings, or collecting user and system data.

Ransomware

Beginning in Q3, the number of new ransomware samples began to grow again after a four-quarter decline. In Q4, the number of new samples grew 155 percent.

Signed Malware

After a brief drop in new malicious signed binaries, the pace of growth resumed in Q4 with a 17 percent increase in total signed binaries.

Total Malware

McAfee Labs now detects 387 new samples of malware every minute, or more than six every second.

The full McAfee Labs Threats Report: February 2015 can be downloaded from here

Web services provider ResellerClub has launched a slew of promotions across all its hosting products and security add-ons all through February to mark its birthday. According to the terms of the offer, both existing and new resellers of ResellerClub can take advantage of fantastic discounts across a wide array of products like servers, shared hosting, website security & backup, website builder as well as popular gTLDs, emerging new gTLDs and ccTLDs.

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Shridhar Luthria, General Manager & Business Head of ResellerClub said

We’ve come a long way from where we started and over the past couple of years have focused aggressively on providing our resellers with a comprehensive product portfolio of hosting and domains as well as consistently rolling out new feature upgrades.

These discounts are our gesture of thanks, a salute to the dedication and acumen of our Resellers who have made it big in the domains and hosting business and helped us complete yet another fruitful year. We welcome each one of you to be a part of our big birthday bash! We hope resellers make the most of these promotions and grow their businesses even further.

Well, if you are a startup or SMB, there are some deals up for grabs:

  • Servers : Upto 30% off, starting at Rs. 600/month
  • Shared Hosting : Upto 50% off, starting at Rs. 160 per month
  • Codeguard & Sitelock Website Security : Upto 33% off, starting at Rs. 45/month
  • Comodo SSL Certificates : Upto 40% off, starting at Rs. 750/year
  • Website Builder : Upto 20% off, starting at Rs. 100/month

In addition to these products, the company is also offering fantastic discounts on popular gTLDs and New gTLDs such as .PW, .HOST, .CO, .GLOBAL and more.

About ResellerClub

The ResellerClub platform powers some of the world’s most popular web hosts, domain resellers, web designers and technology consultants. ResellerClub provides scalable and secure shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS solutions, dedicated servers, managed servers as well a host of website security products, in addition to a comprehensive suite of gTLDs, ccTLDs, new gTLDs & other essential web presence and website security products.

Current Partners : Over 200,000
Domains Served : Over 5 Million
Server Locations : US, United Kingdom, India, Hong Kong, Turkey

For more information about these and other promotions that ResellerClub is currently offering, please visit http://india.resellerclub.com/promos?hosting

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BlackBerry Limited, a global leader in mobile communications & NantHealth, a cloud-based information technology provider combining science & big data to transform healthcare announced the first secure clinical genome browser that gives doctors unprecedented access to patients’ genetic data on the BlackBerry Passport smartphone – The NantOmics Cancer Genome Browser.

The NantOmics Cancer Genome Browser platform on the BlackBerry Passport enables deep, interactive reporting on genomics data for physicians & other treatment providers in clinical settings – for example, Giving oncologists a powerful view into the individual genetic alternations that make each patient’s disease unique and highlighting relevant treatment options. The BlackBerry Passport’s large high resolution screen enables clinicians to view a patient’s chromosome at an individual base-pair level. It is the first in a series of innovative offerings being developed jointly by BlackBerry and NantHealth for use by healthcare professionals.

On the occasion John Chen, Executive Chairman and CEO, BlackBerry mentioned :

BlackBerry’s partnership with NantHealth illustrates how the mobile security and collaboration technology we are known for can be re-imagined to create revolutionary applications across a variety of industries. BlackBerry technology has proven itself secure, reliable and powerful enough to be counted on in life-and-death situations. Its innovative form and functionality make BlackBerry Passport an ideal addition to a doctor’s medical kit.

Patrick Soon-Shiong, M.D., Founder & CEO of NantHealth mentioned:

The proprietary NantOmics Cancer Genome Browser enables clinicians for the first time to investigate a tumor genome from the full three billion bases down to the single-base level in real-time, thanks to the power of the NantOmics supercomputing infrastructure. This integrates with NantHealth’s treatment recommendation engine, Eviti, to personalize treatment protocols to individual patients based on their genomic signature.

NantHealth has quietly built the unique capability of placing a super-computer into the doctor’s hand at point of care and in time of need. Now with BlackBerry’s partnership and through the power of the cloud and secure networks, the reality is we are now able to put dozens of supercomputers, through mobile devices, into doctor’s hands on a global basis. Our goal is to extend this unique capability from doctor to patient, thereby establishing patient empowered 21st century health.

Powered by BlackBerry’s mobile security infrastructure, the NantOmics Cancer Genome Browser is fully encrypted to allow deployment in a HIPAA-secured environment, enabling clinicians to securely access patient data as soon as it’s available, wherever they are. BlackBerry’s recently launched BES12 cross-platform EMM solution will enable hospital IT administrators to easily deploy the application to a clinician’s BlackBerry Passport smartphone and ensures that the application data is fully secure end-to-end.

The NantOmics Cancer Genome Browser will be demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show [CES] in January and will be preloaded on BlackBerry Passport devices and available to the professional community in early 2015.

About NantHealth

NantHealth, a member of the NantWorks ecosystem of companies, is a transformational healthcare cloud-based IT company converging science & technology through a single integrated clinical platform, to provide actionable health information at the point of care, in the time of need, anywhere, anytime. NantHealth works to transform clinical delivery with actionable clinical intelligence at the moment of decision, enabling clinical discovery through real-time machine learning systems. The company’s technology empowers physicians, patients, payers and researchers to transcend the traditional barriers of today’s healthcare system. For more information please visit NantHealth

About BlackBerry

A global leader in mobile communications, BlackBerry revolutionized the mobile industry when it was introduced in 1999. Today, BlackBerry aims to inspire the success of our millions of customers around the world by continuously pushing the boundaries of mobile experiences. For more information, visit BlackBerry

Image Credit : 9to5mac