Twitter Secure Plugin and Security Essentials
In recent months Twitter has significantly grown in popularity. With the increasing exposure hackers have also stepped up their efforts to exploit the service for monetary gain. There are several ways that Twitter has been attacked. The most common way is through malicious links. The weblinks will point to a phishing website designed to steal one's Twitter account information and or bank information. Thankfully, a new tool has been released to combat the rise of malicious links. The secure plugin by Finjan Software attempts to limit a users exposure to a phishing attack. When a user goes to Twitter the software will scan all of the websites links for malicious websites. This is an excellent tool because the majority of Twitter links are disguised whether intentionally or not through link services such as Tiny URL etc. Normal antivirus link scanning toolbar's such as AVG's link scanner, will report the link as safe because the scanner cannot follow the link to its real destination. The link scanner will confuse the TinyURL name for the phishing website. Therefore, Finjan Software's toolbar is actually very technologically advanced and superior to current services. In addition, the toolbar also supports many other blogging sites such as Gmail, Digg, Myspace etc. The toolbar is fully compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Click here to download the Secure Twitter Plugin
The previous article talked about Microsoft's new free antivirus called Morro. However, the product was released today and is now referred to as Secure Essentials. The software is free to the first 75,000 users that download the antivirus. The first main advantage to the software is its extremely basic interface. The antivirus offers a Quick, Full, and Custom scans. The Quick scan will scan only the most important parts of a hard drive such as the Windows or the Documents and Settings folder. The Quick Scan will take about 12 minutes on a 50 gigabyte system partition. The full system scan is recommended for more serious virus infections. Unfortunately, a full system scan will take considerably longer. In tests, the scan scan took about an hour and a half. The antivirus also includes a defense shield. This is an excellent feature because a lot of free antivirus don't include real time scanning. Security Essentials also has rootkit detection. Interestingly, most free antivirus also do not have root kit support so this makes Security Essentials fairly unique. For example, if you check free AVG's context menu root kit detection is unchecked as it is only included in the paid version. Security Essentials also has the ability to easily schedule scans and provides a fair amount of customization.
Register and Download Microsoft Security Essentials here