Cyber Security Challenge Launched

In an attempt to find the next generation of cyber security professionals, and because there are not enough cyber security professionals to go around!, the UK Government has launched the Cyber Security Challenge.

With online and face-to-face competitions, the challenge is set to highlight the profession as a career option, and encourages anyone who thinks they are up to the challenge to enter.

Prizes range from free courses, free bursaries to go to university, access to professional expertise and resources and memberships of professional bodies.

If you think you might like to try, you can enter over at cybersecuritychallenge.org.uk, they have categories in network defence, digital forensics, and an online digital treasure hunt (to be launched later in the year); the best of the best will be invited to take part in a cyber security masterclass, being devised by EADS and HP Labs, to find an overall champion.

We found this approach to raising awareness of security issues, and the skills needed to tackle them interesting, and wanted to share them with you. Good luck, if you enter.

P2P Networks: An Increased Risk of Malware Infection

In Cisco’s latest (Q2) Global Threat Report, which is an aggregated report of data and insights of threats from the Cisco Security and Intelligence Operations, one of the key highlights was the increased usage by users of peer-to-peer networks, and the increased instance of malware developers using these networks to get malware (viruses, trojans etc) onto user computers.

The report highlights further that malware, in general, is also on the increase, as malware developers focus less on destruction of computing data and programs, and more and more on accessing data (and in particular for identity theft and banking credentials) stored on the computer, or harnessing the computer for the propagation of spam and other malware.

Another worrying sign highlighted by the report was the increase in web-based malware being delivered by direct search engine results, as malware writers get good at SEO.

We feel that this highlights the essential need of users to use a great antivirus solution, backed up with a light-weight always updated anti-spyware solution, and great care should be taken before clicking on links produced by search engine portals, that link straight into executables, or other malware infection vectors, such as drive-by threats.

As ever, extreme caution before clicking anything, or downloading something – and especially installing something on your computer must be taken, as common sense along with great security software is your best defence; but common sense should always come first.

Your own software company, without the software

If you’re entrepreneurial, then perhaps SPAMfighter can help you to have your own software company, where you can resell our software as your own.

This approach is called white label, and SPAMfighter’s white label program is totally controllable by you with some of the best tools in the business.

Some of the benefits of this program:

• You control the look and feel with your own graphics
• All internal links from the software go to YOUR website, not ours.
• You have full-time account managers who support you through the process.
• You can be up and running in as little as four weeks.

The products are available in multiple languages, which might open up new markets for you.

It’s a great way to expand your current offerings, or if you are up to the challenge (and can convince us too) to build a business from scratch.

We currently offer two products in our white label arsenal, SLOW-PCfighter and SPAMfighter Pro. We’ll be adding more of our software to the program over the coming months.

What do you need to bring to the table?

• Ingenuity in sales
• Entrepreneurial spirit
• An existing user base, or an idea how you’ll build one quickly
• Market savvy for your local market
• First level support of your direct customers

If you are interested in building or extending your current business with your own software brand, then please read the white label page here for more details and how to sign up.

SLOW-PCfighter’s Top Ten Review

With Spring upon us, it’s not just our homes we’ll be spring-cleaning: our PCs deserve some attention too. We’re offering a nice Spring discount, which will help us celebrate  a great review Top Ten Reviews gave us of our PC optimization product, SLOW-PCfighter. They said:

“We ran SLOW-PCfighter and it found and corrected more than 1400 errors in 1 min and 17 seconds.  It took our PC’s health from Bad to Very Good in a stunning short period of time.”

You can see the full video review of SLOW-PCfighter below (or directly on YouTube) or get a free spring clean error check, or get up to 33% off of SLOW-PCfighter for a limited time.

We’d love to hear your comments via the form below.

VB100 Win for VIRUSfighter products

We are very please to announce that VIRUSfighter Pro and VIRUSfighter Plus (coming soon) for Windows desktops has been awarded the coveted VB100 award for testing under Windows XP, Service Pack 3.

This is our first test under the Virus Bulletin testing regime, for our antivirus products, and so it is even more pleasing to have won as well!

Such testing is designed to make sure that antivirus products are a) legitimate and b) meet minimum detection of Wild List viruses, with no false positives.

SPAMfighter ApS is continually striving to make sure our products are best-in-class and provide the very best protection for our customers, and this added certification shows our ongoing commitment to quality and delivering great products to our customers.

We’re not resting on our laurels, however, as the next test is due up soon (for server products), we’ll report back how we did when the testing is over.

Virus Bulletin VB100 Award

Lost In Translation

We think we support a lot of languages with our products, and via translations of our web pages. But are we doing enough? We’re adding new languages all of the time, but sometimes, we need a shove in the right direction.

What languages would you like to see our products translated into that are not currently supported?

Let us know in the comments.

20 Year Sentence for TJX Hacker

As reported by Help Net Security, and Wired magazine, the infamous TJX Hacker (Albert Gonzales) has been sentenced to a record 20 years in prison for stealing, with his accomplices, over 90 million unsuspecting users credit card details.

This highlights two key things to take away from the story:

1. Online data and identity theft is not just a serious threat, but that it has also gravitated away from being a small-scale “person in a room” approach to being a serious criminal enterprise.
2. Users really need to take identity theft, and therefore protection of their systems seriously.

The story highlights just how much criminal gangs can take from this kind of online “data capture”, and the large sums of money involved.

SPAMfighter recommends at the very least antivirus and anti-spam protection to counter these types of threat. However, software is never enough, users must take a stronger more proactive role in keeping themselves safe online. Our previous blog post on doing so can be found here.

SPAMfighter reaches 7 million Users

We are very pleased to announce that we just reached the seven million user mile-stone on our SPAMfighter product, a community driven best-of-breed anti-spam product.

The milestone has been a massive achievement by our team, to whom we give a nod of thanks (I’m sure we’ll celebrate soon!), however, we would especially like to thank you, our customers and SPAMfighters, for getting us to this milestone.

We’re not resting on our laurels, though. We’ll keep working hard to make our products better and better.

Here’s to the next seven million.

Product Improvement

Here at SPAMfighter Towers (okay, we’re not really based in a tower), one of our jobs is to make products better.

That’s not necessarily to say they weren’t wonderful in the first place , but tastes change, features get added (and taken away), and bugs get discovered and fixed.

Our approach has always been to try to deliver the best security, utility and anti-spam software on the planet. We think we do pretty well (though tell us in the comments if you disagree).

We’d like to tell you about a recent inexplicable bug we discovered in one of our security products, so you can see how serious we are about quality.

The bug caused the slow opening of MS Word documents, and, should you repeatedly open and close the same document over and over, it could cause a system crash. Okay, it is unlikely you’d actually do that – repeatedly – but, well, one of our dedicated team did just that to help see what would work and what would not.

Once we discovered the bug, the whole team, product marketing, product management, our senior team (board members), the development team and our lovely support team got to work.

Like most software companies, we “eat our own dog food”, an expression that means we all use our own software, so we can see things better from a customer perspective. So, once we had an idea there was a bug, the whole team go about proving it.

It is incredibly important in the software business that we test for repeatability. If a bug is repeatable it is not only easier to find, but it is actual confirmation that we have a bug.

Our QA and development team then promptly go into over-time, working whatever hours are required to get a fix. This is important, because bugs are likely to impact you, our customers, no matter how arcane the way they manifest themselves.

After a lot of hard work, a Release Candidate for the fix is sent out internally, and we all then test to see if we’ve got it nailed. If not, we repeat the whole process until we have, learning new things through each iteration of testing and reporting back.

This one turned out to be one of our hardest to find yet, and was actually one bug report manifested as four bugs, that were very difficult to spot, and only around the clock testing and development work gets these kinds of bugs fixed, but that’s what we do, to make sure that our customers get the best solution possible.

Running SPAMfighter is big operation, we have millions of users in many, many countries, and all expect first-class service at all times, no matter the time of day. We all work and pull together as a team to make sure that happens.

Do we always get it right? As the bug hunt above demonstrates, no. But we do always pull together to make sure we do it right as quickly as possible.

Our QA and testing regime makes sure that you, our customers, rarely see bugs “in the wild”, and we are committed to the highest standards of customer service because each and every one of you is important to us.

If you have questions, put them in the comments, and we’d love to answer them.

We’ll tell you more about what we do in a future post.

Tell us what you think of SPAMfighter Products

At SPAMfighter we take our product development seriously. We strive to make the best software available to meet, you, our customer’s, needs.

However, in order to do that well, we need to hear from you. Please tell us your experiences and thoughts in the comments, to let us know how we are doing, and how we can do better.

We look forward to hearing from you!