Security Threats on Window Vista and Beyond

A seminar was conducted by InternetNow! with title "Security Threats on Windows Vista and Beyond".

A great seminar..

Windows Vista is finally launched. After so many years.... And it promised greater securities.

A few questions to ask Vista users...

1. Having Windows Vista, do you still need antivirus ?
2. Windows Vista provides a freeware called Windows Defender, is it good enough ?

UAC (User Account Control)...

Actually the bigger thing from Vista is called UAC.

UAC assumes every users as standard users. Therefore, one would need permission to do just anything. In other words, it can be considered to be an overly protective parent.

Thus, when one tries to execute a trojan file, UAC will ask one to think twice. And if users are deceived through psychology that such file is safe indeed, then UAC has no way to prevent the system from being hit.

Good news is that it can be turned off.

Therefore, anti-virus and anti-spyware softwares are still needed with UAC around.

History of Virus...

Let's examin a bit on the history of viruses and etc.

1986 - Boot sector viruses
1987 - File viruses
1994 - Email viruses
1995 - Macro viruses
1998 - 2006 - Malwares (Virus, trojan and etc)

Therefore these days, we should not only be thinking about anti-virus, it has to be anti-malwares.

Good Characteristic of an anti-malwares...

1. Frequency of updates ?
2. How many categories can it detect and CLEANRemove malwares ?
3. OS backward compatibility... For instance, most latest software would support Windows XP, but does it support Windows 98?
4. Is it resource friendly ? Fujitsu A6010E can only last 1 hour and 15 minutes under normal usage you know..
5. Technical competencies of support team ?
6. License or subscription renewal affordability ?

InternetNow Dr. Web ...

Because part of this content belongs to InternetNow!, we will do some marketing here.

InternetNow! Dr. Web is an anti-malware software.

It has ...

1. Updates of 5 times per day.
2. It can detect and CLEANRemove many categories.
3. It supports up to Windows 95 SE with at least 64 MB RAM.
4. It is very resource friendly.
5. Its support teams consist of developers.
6. It is of Malaysian Budget.

So, it is a good software per se.

And how well does Windows Defender faired against these five points ? We gotta find out.

One thing for sure... Windows Defender is not an anti-malwares, it doesn't include anti-virus in its features. Why ? Maybe because Microsoft feels obligated to protect people like Norton, TrendMicro and etc.

Conclusion ...

1. Turning off UAC is merely just a matter of one registry key from "regedit".

2. InternetNOW's Dr. Web is able to go deep during real-time scan.

Some other anti-malware softwares do not go deep during real-time scan, which means that if today there is a trojan horse executable which has been zipped three times, it may not be detected. This may not be too critical because as soon as users extracted out the real file from the root, defense will be triggered anyway. Nevertheless, the question is that how accurate is the marketing message representing the actual solution provided.

Which means that if an anti-malware software is not able to scan nested-zipped files and that it claims to be the fastest and most prominent real-time scanner, then it is not accurate.

Real-time scan refers to the ability of the anti-malware software to conduct an accurate analysis of the object at the point of contact with the system.

How real-time is InternetNow! Dr. Web ? You gotta test it out.

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