Simple Antivirus is Not Enough Anymore. ESET is Introducing All-in-One Protection for Consumers in India

ESET a global leader in cybersecurity, today announced the launch of its new innovative and streamlined offering for consumers in India. With more than 30 years on the market, ESET has moved to unify its broadly deployed consumer product portfolio. Specifically, ESET is introducing two brand-new customer-centric subscription tiers, namely ESET HOME Security Essential and ESET HOME Security Premium, providing both broad and reliable digital life protection with new features such as Browser Privacy & Security extension.

Responding to the increasing demand for an all-in-one solution that offers intuitive use of these new features, ESET is introducing an improved ESET HOME—a comprehensive security management platform. Available across all major operating systems—Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS—and includes visibility into home networks and connected smart devices.

"Today's digital landscape has become increasingly sophisticated, with online threats, such as phishing and banking scams, frequently making headlines. At ESET, we are committed to empowering consumers to remain protected online. The new ESET HOME Security is powered by a combination of AI, human insight, and cloud protection, providing all-in-one security solutions that enable our users to safeguard themselves, their families, and their homes from various digital threats. This will enable them to connect, explore, shop, bank, and thrive in the digital space," said Parvinder Walia, ESET President for Asia Pacific and Japan.

Complete security management platform

Research among ESET customers shows that the vast majority of ESET HOME users define themselves as home admins, those who take care of their household’s digital security. They are tech savvy but don’t want to spend much time managing ESET products. To meet customers’ needs, ESET has made improvements to ESET HOME. Now, as a complete security management platform, it is a seamless part of the user experience. In this place, managing devices, online purchases, subscription activation and renewal, downloading or upgrading security solutions, and enabling powerful functionalities like Anti-Theft and more, are all a seamless part of existing user flows.

To enhance user experience and simplify the platform’s management, ESET has made several interface changes, including the introduction of our Overall Protection Status, so users can see the level of protection for their household in one view. This combines both the validity status of a user’s licenses and the security status of devices connected to the account in three categories: Protected, Attention Required, and Security Alert.

These changes aim to provide customers with cutting-edge protection, while minimal interaction is needed to set up the product. At the same time, this new ecosystem provides meaningful options and functionality for proactive users who want to control and customize it. ESET HOME is an easy-to-use web portal and mobile app available for both iOS & Android.

Explore new subscription tiers and their features

Also introduced with this launch are the new subscription tiers for this new ecosystem—ESET HOME Security Essential and ESET HOME Security Premium. Subscription tiers provide all-in-one protection with low system impact, covering the complex needs of individuals and their households for digital life privacy and security. ESET HOME Security subscriptions are available on all major operating systems —Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS.

ESET HOME Security Essential is an entry-level subscription tier with protection features including improved modern endpoint security, multilayered real-time protection, as well as additional tools that further enhance the user’s ability to protect against various threats. Included are the Safe Banking & Browsing feature, designed to protect user’s sensitive data; Network Inspector, a diagnostic tool providing information on the security of the user’s router and display of devices connected to the network; and Parental Control to keep your family safe from inappropriate online content. Newly developed browser extensions (compatible with Chrome, Edge, and Firefox) provide enhancement of the Browser Privacy & Security feature. It includes cleanup tool such as Browser Cleanup, that cleans cookies, history, and much more from the browser regularly or on-demand. 

The middle tier, ESET HOME Security Premium, extends the feature set further by adding other security functionalities such as a Password Manager that protects and stores users’ passwords and personal data. This includes an automatic and accurate form-filling feature, saving their time when filling out web forms. Secure Data functionality boosts their privacy and security with powerful encryption of files and removable media, preventing data theft in the event of USB or laptop loss, and ensuring secure collaboration and data sharing. ESET HOME Security Premium offers the ESET LiveGuard tool, cloud-based protection specifically designed to mitigate never-before-seen threats.

The most advanced subscription tier, ESET HOME Security Ultimate, will be released in Q1 2024 and comes with brand-new ESET features, such as VPN.

Device-tailored security solutions

ESET HOME Security takes device protection to a new level by seamlessly integrating a suite of standalone device protection solutions tailored to meet customers’ security needs. This includes ESET Antivirus, ESET Mobile Security (EMS), Parental Control, and ESET Smart TV Security.

ESET HOME Security Premium is currently on a year-end sale, with discounts of up to 30% until December 31, 2023. Visit www.eset.com/in for more details.


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Users Risk Safety by Re-Using Breached Credentials for Financial, Email Accounts: Google

Many people re-use breached, unsafe credentials for sensitive financial, government and email accounts, putting their account at risk of hijacking by cyber criminals, according to tech giant Google.

In a recent blogpost, Google said hijackers routinely attempt to sign in to sites across the web with credentials exposed by third-party breaches.

If netizens use strong, unique passwords for all their accounts, this risk disappears, it said.

"Based on anonymous telemetry reported by the Password Checkup extension, we found that users reused breached, unsafe credentials for some of their most sensitive financial, government, and email accounts," it added.

Cyber attackers often have wide-scale access to billions of stolen usernames and passwords. The risk, as per Google, was even more prevalent on shopping sites (where users may save credit card details), news, and entertainment sites.

"In fact, outside the most popular web sites, users are 2.5X more likely to reuse vulnerable passwords, putting their account at risk of hijacking," the blog post said.

In February, Google had announced the Password Checkup extension for Chrome. This extension displays a warning when a user signs in to a site using one of the over four billion usernames and passwords that Google knows to be unsafe due to a third-party data breach.

Google said in the first month alone, it scanned 21 million usernames and passwords, and flagged over 3,16,000 accounts as unsafe - which was 1.5 per cent of the sign-ins scanned by the extension.

The tech giant has added two new features for the Password Checkup extension.

It is adding a direct feedback mechanism where users can inform the company about any issues that they are facing via a quick comment box.

The second features is aimed at giving users more control over their data, the blogpost said.

It allows users to opt-out of the anonymous telemetry that the extension reports, including the number of lookups that surface an unsafe credential, whether an alert leads to a password change, and the domain involved for improving site coverage, the blogpost said.

"By design, the Password Checkup extension ensures that Google never learns the username or password of the user, regardless of whether they enable telemetry, but we still want to provide this option if users would prefer not to share this information," it added. PTI SR

Cryptominers Tops India Malware Threat Index

Check Point Research,  the Threat Intelligence arm of Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. , a leading provider of cyber security solutions globally, has published its latest Global Threat Index for March 2019. The index reveals that while cryptomining services such as Coinhive have closed down, cryptominers are still the most prevalent malware aimed at organizations globally.

As announced last month, both Coinhive and Authedmine stopped their mining services on March 8th. For the first time since December 2017, Coinhive dropped from the top position but, despite having only operated for eight days in March, it was still the 6th most prevalent malware to affect organizations during the month. At its peak, Coinhive impacted 23% of organizations worldwide.

Many websites still contain the Coinhive JavaScript code today, though with no mining activity taking place., Check Point’s researchers warn that Coinhive may well reactivate if the value of Monero increases. Alternatively, other mining services may increase their activity to take advantage of Coinhive’s absence.

During March, three of the top five most prevalent malware were cryptominers – Cryptoloot, XMRig and JSEcoin. Cryptoloot headed the Threat Index for the first time, closely followed by Emotet, the modular trojan. Both had a global impact of 6%. XMRig is the third most popular malware impacting 5% of organizations worldwide.

Maya Horowitz, Threat Intelligence and Research Director at Check Point commented: “With cryptocurrencies’ values dropping overall since 2018, we will be seeing more cryptominers for browsers following Coinhive’s steps and ceasing operation. However, I suspect that cyber criminals will find ways to earn from more robust cryptomining activities, such as mining on Cloud environments, where the built-in auto-scaling feature allows the creation of a larger haul of cryptocurrency.  We have seen organizations being asked to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to their Cloud vendors for the compute resources used illicitly by cryptominers. This is a call for action for organizations to secure their Cloud environments." 

March 2019’s Top 3 ‘Most Wanted’ Malware:

*The arrows relate to the change in rank compared to the previous month.

1. ↑ Cryptoloot - Crypto-Miner that uses the victim’s CPU or GPU power and existing resources for crypto mining - adding transactions to the blockchain and releasing new currency. It is a competitor to Coinhive, trying to pull the rug under it by asking a smaller percentage of revenue from websites.


2. ↑ Emotet – Advanced, self-propagate and modular Trojan. Emotet once used to employ as a banking Trojan, and recently is used as a distributer to other malware or malicious campaigns. It uses multiple methods for maintaining persistence and evasion techniques to avoid detection. In addition, it can be spread through phishing spam emails containing malicious attachments or links.


3. ↑ XMRig- Open-source CPU mining software used for the mining process of the Monero cryptocurrency, and first seen in-the-wild on May 2017.

This month Hiddad is the most prevalent Mobile malware, replacing Lotoor at first place in the top mobile malware list. Triada remains in third place.

March’s Top 3 ‘Most Wanted’ Mobile Malware:

1. Hiddad - Android malware which repackages legitimate apps and then released them to a third-party store. Its main function is displaying ads, however it is also able to gain access to key security details built into the OS, allowing an attacker to obtain sensitive user data.


2. Lotoor- Hack tool that exploits vulnerabilities on Android operating system in order to gain root privileges on compromised mobile devices.


3. Triada - Modular Backdoor for Android which grants super user privileges to downloaded malware, as helps it to get embedded into system processes. Triada has also been seen spoofing URLs loaded in the browser.

Check Point’s researchers also analyzed the most exploited cyber vulnerabilities. CVE-2017-7269 is still leading the top exploited vulnerabilities with a 44% global impact. Web Server Exposed Git Repository Information Disclosure and is in second place, with OpenSSL TLS DTLS Heartbeat Information Disclosure in third, both impacting 40% of organizations worldwide.

March’s Top 3 ‘Most Exploited’ vulnerabilities:

1. ↔ Microsoft IIS WebDAV ScStoragePathFromUrl Buffer Overflow (CVE-2017-7269) - By sending a crafted request over a network to Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 through Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0, a remote attacker could execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service conditions on the target server. That is mainly due to a buffer overflow vulnerability resulted by improper validation of a long header in HTTP request.


2. ↑ Web Server Exposed Git Repository Information Disclosure- An information disclosure vulnerability has been reported in Git Repository. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow an unintentional disclosure of account information.


3. ↑ OpenSSL TLS DTLS Heartbeat Information Disclosure (CVE-2014-0160; CVE-2014-0346) - An information disclosure vulnerability exists in OpenSSL. The vulnerability is due to an error when handling TLS/DTLS heartbeat packets. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to disclose memory contents of a connected client or server.

Check Point’s Global Threat Impact Index and its ThreatCloud Map is powered by Check Point’s ThreatCloud intelligence, the largest collaborative network to fight cybercrime which delivers threat data and attack trends from a global network of threat sensors. The ThreatCloud database holds over 250 million addresses analyzed for bot discovery, more than 11 million malware signatures and over 5.5 million infected websites, and identifies millions of malware types daily.

The below table also gives you an understanding on how India is faring in terms of malware attacks as compared to global counterparts

 

Find top 10 per country
Malware_Family_Name	Description	Global Impact	INDIA Impact
XMRig	XMRig is an open-source CPU mining software used for the mining process of the Monero cryptocurrency, and first seen in-the-wild on May 2017.	7.68%	22.64%
Coinhive	Crypto Miner designed to perform online mining of Monero cryptocurrency when a user visits a web page without the user's approval. The implanted JS uses great computational resources of the end users machines to mine coins, thus impacting its performance.	11.59%	21.40%
Dorkbot	IRC-based Worm designed to allow remote code execution by its operator, as well as the download of additional malware to the infected system, with the primary motivation being to steal sensitive information and launch denial-of-service attacks.	3.75%	12.04%
Jsecoin	JavaScript miner that can be embedded in websites. With JSEcoin, you can run the miner directly in your browser in exchange for an ad-free experience, in-game currency and other incentives.	5.57%	11.52%
Cryptoloot	cryptominer malware, using the victim’s CPU or GPU power and existing resources for crypto mining - adding transactions to the blockchain and releasing new currency. It is a competitor to Coinhive.	6.23%	10.03%
Emotet	Advanced, self-propagating and modular Trojan. Emotet used to operate as a banking Trojan, and has evolved to be used as a distributer of other malware or malicious campaigns. It uses multiple methods and evasion techniques for maintaining persistence and avoiding detection. In addition, it can be spread through phishing spam emails containing malicious attachments or links.	5.14%	7.75%
Virut	Virut is one of the major botnets and malware distributors in the Internet. It is used in DDoS attacks, spam distribution, data theft and fraud. The malware is spread through executables originating from infected devices.	1.71%	7.55%
Ramnit	Ramnit is a worm that infects and spreads mostly through removable drives and files uploaded to public FTP services. The malware creates a copy of itself to infect removable and permanent drivers. The malware also functions as a backdoor.	2.57%	7.24%
Nitol	Nitol is a Bot agent that targets the Windows platform. This malware collects basic system information and sends it to a remote server. An attacker can instruct the remote server to respond with commands primarily designed to carry out DoS attacks	1.05%	7.13%
Fireball	Fireball is an adware vastly distributed by the Chinese digital marketing company Rafotech. It acts as a browser-hijacker which changes the default search engine and installs tracking pixels, but can be turned into a full-functioning malware downloader.	1.68%	6.36%

The complete list of the top 10 malware families in March can be found on the Check Point Blog: https://blog.checkpoint.com/2019/04/09/march-2019s-most-wanted-malware-cryptomining-still-dominates-despite-coinhive-closure/

[Top Featured Image - Emsisoft Blog]

How to Ensure Your Child’s Online Safety?

Just like any other technologies, Internet too has got its own advantages as well as disadvantages. Internet has turned world into a global village and now, it is possible to get access to any part of the world in no time by just a click of a mouse! However, this accessibility is uncontrollable and in order to avail its benefits, one needs to use it wisely and sensibly.

Your child and Internet

Children nowadays get used to latest technologies at a tender age; sometimes well before they start going to the school. As soon as a child develops an understanding towards the world, he also starts getting access to modern accessories like laptop, cell phone and internet. Children, by nature are fast learners and they take them no time to learn and use modern gadgets like laptop and cell phone. They are also smart enough to find cool stuff like vikings and get hooked to them!  Though this is a good trait, yet, due to their ignorance and tenderness, they always stand a chance to get exploited or misguided by the technology.

How can technology harm your child?

Just a wrong click of the mouse could turn out fatal for children as it can give them access to kind of content or stuff, which is not suitable for them in anyways. Be it a link to a violent video or mature content, if they get access to them at a tender age, that is most likely to impact their mind adversely, as they do not know how to suddenly react and handle such a situation.

Role of a responsible parent

Therefore, it is necessary for the parents to monitor their child’s activity on internet as much as possible. That being said, this task is easier said than done. Children's, like adults, also need their space and they do not like interference of any kind by the parents in any ways. Although the intentions of the parents could be good, yet, it is very hard for them to make their children understand this situation

Any interference or commands like “turn off computer now!” or “stay away from site ABC…” is seen by a child as a hindrance of his freedom. As Child Psychology goes, if you ask a child to do certain thing and he does not like your tone, then he might not do it. In the same way, if you ask him to refrain himself from something then he is most likely to do that because of psychological reasons.

Therefore, it is necessary for parents to act smart as well as sensible in this matter and ensure their child’s safety on the Internet without making that evident to him. This means that they not only need to take certain preventive measures but they also need to do that smartly and in a more sophisticated manner.

The solution

You can surely take some smart preventive measures to safeguard your child's interest and safety on internet. You have to take further steps depending on his age group and level of understanding,. If your child is around 5 or 6 years of age and he has just started accessing cell phones and internet recently, then as he might not be able to discrete between good and bad and also not mature enough to react to certain type of content on the Internet, it would be best to protect your system or cell phone by a password, so that he cannot access internet without your permission. In this way, whenever he wants to access the net, he will have to come to you for unlocking the device and you would be present nearby to keep a watch on his activities.

If that is not possible or if your child does not like that kind of set up, then a sensible way would be installing some software or applications that can automatically detect and filter content which is not suitable for a child. You can simply browse on net and you would be able to find different applications and software that can do this job for you. You would simply need to install a suitable software or on your cell phone or computer and get it activated. This will automatically prevent your device from opening links that has content that is not suitable for children.

There are some spy and tracking software that are available in the market, that would be helpful in keeping a check on the online activities of your child. This would also be necessary because child, being tender, would not know what is right for him and what is not and as a parent, it is your responsibility to keep a check on him and at the same time you also would not let him know about the fact that he is being monitored.

Apart from these tips, it is very important that you communicate properly with your kid and make him understand about what is good for him and what is not. In this case, you need to be sensible and do not try to command the child because nobody likes to get orders. Be friendly with him and share with him all that you have in your mind. Also let him share his views’ once you are friends with him, he will be comfortable in sharing all kinds of things that he has in mind. This would be helpful for you in understanding the nature of your child and then you can plan things accordingly.

Self control is the best control!

As the famous saying goes, the best type of control is self control and this saying holds true for everyone, including your child. So, if you can help your child develop that kind of self-control within himself or herself, and help him in developing an understanding towards what is right for him to view online and what is not (as per his age group) then you will be able to get the most appropriate solution for online safety. That being said, technology is always going to be helpful for you and you can always use the right applications and software to prevent your child from viewing inappropriate content on internet.  

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