Posted 10/22/09 at 08:06:10 PM by Bart Salisbury

Human ingenuity is endlessly fascinating. Offer a guy a penny to do a task, and he’ll turn you down, no matter how simple. But give him a computer and let him write some code that will do it automatically, and he’ll take you to the cleaners.

Botnets, those pesky little creatures that perform automatic tasks, are not only becoming more commonplace, they are becoming more sophisticated. These nasty little beasties are now being used in ever more cunning ways to suck income out of unsuspecting advertisers and search engines through click fraud. According to Click Forensics, botnets accounted for 42.6% of all click fraud in the 3rd quarter of 2009--a near double increase over the same period in 2008.

You have to admire the ingenuity. One botnet, “Bahama,” carefully mimics natural searches to make them look real, and hence harder to detect. The botnet’s name comes from it redirecting traffic through some 200,000 parked domains in the Bahamas. Ultimately, the origins of the botnet was traced to the Ukrainian Fan Club, known as “online fraudsters,” and most likely comprised of guys hygienically unable to date.

Most botnet activity comes from outside the United States: the United Kingdom, Vietnam, and Germany being the top three. Germany and Vietnam I can understand, but the United Kingdom? I’ve been there. They aren’t that clever. They put a lemon wedge in a Corona.

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Posted 08/06/08 at 10:55:01 AM by Chris Moody

Malware is the vile scourge of the internet. It invades your privacy, tracking where you’ve been on the internet to sell to marketing companies interested in your browsing habits. It invades your computer, sending pop-ups for products you don’t want, or it tricks users into buying some bogus program to fix nonexistent problems with their PCs. It steals resources from your computer, taking up CPU time, RAM and drive space. Being a malware programmer must rank up there with pimp-meister for jobs that you don’t tell friends and family that you do.

It used to be that you would pickup malware from ending up on a bogus site someplace, but it turns out that it is coming from almost everywhere now, according to a Websense report. About 75 percent of it comes from legitimate sites that have been compromised. That is an almost 50 percent rise over Q3 & Q4 of 2007. Of the top 100 websites on the internet 60 percent either hosted malicious content or contained a redirect to lure victims to malicious sites.

Always have your protection when surfing the internet boys and girls and not just FireFox like in the poster image below. An up to date Internet Security Suite is a must have.

You can visit the complete Websense report here for all the latest info on the filth lurking on the internet.

What do you do to protect your computer from Malware? Wrapping it in latex doesn't count.

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Posted 02/20/08 at 06:00:55 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

The complete PDF archive of the February 2008 edition of Maximum PC, every article included, every page posted! Download it now!

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Posted 02/07/08 at 02:43:16 PM by Paul Lilly

With PC threats continually evolving & multiplying, is it time to upgrade our traditional anti-malware suites?

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