Labs are for nerds, it's simply Kaspersky now – just hold still while we cyber-immunise you The strategy boutique opened a pop-up shop on the wild steppe of Kaspersky Lab yesterday as the Russian antivirus developer revealed a daring redesign that involves dropping the word "Lab". Gone too are the beautifully random red triangles, the evocative over-sized "SS", and the multiple fonts – thrown overboard in favour of …
The stupidities they can spout in order to make us think that their ten-minute brainstorming actually produced something meaningful.
Mathematically exact ? Really ? What maths did you use to get that conclusion ?
The only thing I see is a name entirely in lower case written with letters that aren't finished. Not impressed.
That's why they get paid the big money. The more psycho-babble and BS they can shovel out, the more they can charge. Obviously the saw about the easiest person to sell to is a sales/marketing type is correct. If it looks like, smell like, tastes like BS.... don't step in it.
ten-minute brainstorming actually produced something meaningful
When the organisation I work for changed our name, we spent a fortune on brand design companies to try and come up with a new logo.
In the meantime, one of our creative types[1] fiddled around for 10 minutes on his Mac and created a nice new logo.
Guess which one we went for? As a hint, it's not one of the ones that the brand companies designed at great expense..
[1] No - not the accountants. Their creativity lies in a somewhat different direction..
After all the word "Labs" made it sound as if they had anything to do with science.
After all their basic premise, that you can somehow magically determine whether a piece of software is "good" or "evil" has been proven to be utterly impossible in 1931 and 1937. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem#Timeline
Virus scanner companies are about as unscientific as you can get. They are even worse than flat-earthers as flat-earthers still have the tiny benefit of doubt that we all could be somehow flawed in our perceptions of the world. I mean the earth is not round(ish) because of some purely logical idea, but because it can be observed as round and we observe rules of nature which as a consequence mean that planets will always be round(ish).
Microsoft is extending the Defender brand with a version aimed at families and individuals.
"Defender" has been the company's name of choice for its anti-malware platform for years. Microsoft Defender for individuals, available for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers, is a cross-platform application, encompassing macOS, iOS, and Android devices and extending "the protection already built into Windows Security beyond your PC."
The system comprises a dashboard showing the status of linked devices as well as alerts and suggestions.
Germany's BSI federal cybersecurity agency has warned the country's citizens not to install Russian-owned Kaspersky antivirus, saying it has "doubts about the reliability of the manufacturer."
Russia-based Kaspersky has long been a target of suspicious rumors in the West over its ownership and allegiance to Russia's rulers.
In an advisory published today, the agency said: "The BSI recommends replacing applications from Kaspersky's virus protection software portfolio with alternative products."
Almost nine in 10 organizations that have suffered a ransomware attack would choose to pay the ransom if hit again, according to a new report, compared with two-thirds of those that have not experienced an attack.
The findings come from a report titled "How business executives perceive ransomware threat" by security company Kaspersky, which states that ransomware has become an ever-present threat, with 64 percent of companies surveyed already having suffered an attack, but more worryingly, that executives seem to believe that paying the ransom is a reliable way of addressing the issue.
The report, available here, is based on research involving 900 respondents across North America, South America, Africa, Russia, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. The respondents were in senior non-IT management roles at companies between 50 and 1,000 employees.
Black Hat Asia The advanced persistent threat gang known as SideWinder has gone on an attack spree in the last two years, conducting almost 1,000 raids and deploying increasingly sophisticated attack methods.
Noushin Shaba, a senior security researcher on Kaspersky's global research and analysis team, today told the Black Hat Asia conference that SideWinder mostly targets military and law enforcement agencies in Pakistan, Bangladesh and other South Asian nations. The gang has previously been associated with Indian actors, but Shaba said previous indicators that led to that attribution have disappeared – she was not confident tying the group to any nation.
Shaba was, however, happy to declare that SideWinder has become one of the planet's most prolific attackers. Why the gang has stepped up its activities is not known. The Kaspersky researcher opined that perhaps its resources have increased, by means unknown.
Microsoft has made a standalone version of Microsoft Defender for Business generally available, aimed at customers not keen on paying for one of its subscriptions.
The product is already bundled with Microsoft 365 Business Premium (for businesses with up to 300 employees) but can now be picked up as a standalone product for $3 per user per month, as we reported from Ignite late last year.
Microsoft currently has four tiers of 365 subscriptions, starting at Business Basic (which includes the web versions of the company's productivity apps) for $6, going up to the full-fat premium version for $22 per user per month, with desktop versions of Office apps.
More than a year after essentially being shut down, the notorious Emotet malware operation is showing a strong resurgence.
In a March threat index, Check Point researchers put the Windows software nasty at the top of its list as the most widely deployed malware, menacing or infecting as much as 10 percent of organizations around the globe during the month – a seemingly unbelievable estimate, and apparently double that of February.
Now Kaspersky Labs says a rapidly accelerating and complex spam email campaign is enticing marks with fraudulent messages designed to trick one into unpacking and installing Emotet or Qbot malware that can steal information, collect data on a compromised corporate network, and move laterally through the network and install ransomware or other trojans on networked devices.
Kaspersky has found a vulnerability in the Yanluowang ransomware encryption algorithm and, as a result, released a free decryptor tool to help victims of this software nasty recover their files.
Yanluowang, named after a Chinese deity and underworld judge, is a type of ransomware that has been used against financial institutions and other firms in America, Brazil, and Turkey as well as a smaller number of organizations in Sweden and China, Kaspersky said yesterday. The Russian security shop said it found a fatal flaw in the ransomware's encryption system and those afflicted can get a free fix to restore their scrambled data.
Symantec's threat hunters uncovered this Windows ransomware strain in the fall and said unknown fiends have been using it to infect US corporations since at least August 2021.
The United States' Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has labelled Kaspersky, China Mobile, and China Telecom as threats to national security.
The three companies join Huawei, ZTE, Chinese radio-comms vendor Hytera, and Chinese video surveillance systems vendors Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Company and Dahua Technology Company.
Kaspersky is the first non-Chinese company to be added to the FCC's list, but the agency did not tie its decision to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Australian technology distributor Dicker Data has decided to end its commercial relationship with Russian security software vendor Kaspersky.
CEO David Dicker told The Australian Financial Review the decision was taken out of a belief that Western nations have a responsibility to act, and because chief operating officer Vladimir Mitnovetski is Ukrainian so Dicker Data is therefore directly impacted by the illegal invasion.
Kaspersky confirmed that Dicker Data has chosen to end its relationship, and thanked the distributor for "hard work, dedication and support" since taking on the account in 2019.
The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has advised users of Russian technology products to reassess the risks it presents.
In advice that builds on 2017 guidance about technology supply chains that include links to hostile states, NCSC technical director Ian Levy stated that the agency has not found evidence "that the Russian state intends to suborn Russian commercial products and services to cause damage to UK interests."
But he added that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" – so "it would be prudent to plan for the possibility that this could happen."
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