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2024-10-25 eBay Account Hijacked

The true story of a friend trying to answer questions for an item he was selling on eBay and became a victim of Cross Site Scripting. In this article we take a deeper look at this vulnerability and what you can do to prevent getting your cookies stolen. If you sell anything on eBay, you'll want to read this article.

2024-11-20 Does a home user need a router for added security?

I have read all of your reviews on the virus software companies. My question is; does a home user need a router for added security? I have been told by many who use computers that it's a good idea. The only one who said that I should "take it back to the store", was a tech support worker at my ISP. Well what is your opinion?
Thank You, Mr. Ford

To Have or Not to Have... that is the question.

To answer the question, should you install a router, we need to address what functions the router adds, and which of these functions are security related. Then, look if these services and functions are being supplies elsewhere.

2024-11-13 Internet Child Safety

I feel on my heart to educate readers about an extremely important subject if you have children. Protecting your children against the obscene and graphic pornography that is so easily accessible on the Internet. On average, pornography is only four clicks away from any given website. The majority of children are surfing the Internet with little or no protection preventing them from harmful material.

2007 Antivirus Review

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ZoneAlarm Antivirus

Zone Alarm Antivirus comes with the famous Zone Alarm firewall, Program Control, Antivirus, and Email Protection. In the following review we only focus on the ability of the antivirus applicaiton.

Installation:
After being presented with installation location, and a quick license agreement, the installation takes off independently. You are then asked to fill out the registration survey with 4 easy questions. You are then asked if you want Zone Alarm antivirus to start... why not!

Configuration:
Configuration seems easy as the configuration wizard begins as soon as you start Zone Alarm Antivirus for the first time. As a part of the wizard, it reviews your security settings and gives you a tutorial. Great idea. You are asked if you want to participate in the 'Defense Community', which anonymously send security, spyware, and attack information to Zone Labs. Most of the large security companies are doing this; we're just pleased they asked us as part of the setup.

You're then asked which Smart Defense Advisor setting you would like, which updates the latest program security settings for spyware and treats. The utility offers automatic, in which it will automatically do it for you and manual or off.

After asking if you are ready to turn antivirus protection on, it updates your virus signature files and scans your hard drive for viruses. The setup concludes with a reboot.

As part of the wizard it presents you with the opportunity to watch a three minute tutorial video that shows you how Zone Alarm Antivirus protects you, tips and shortcuts, and when you may need to take action. This is the only program we've reviewed that has offered this, and could be extremely helpful to someone who needs a little more education to feel comfortable running security products.

Zone Alarm Antivirus automatically setup a weekly scan of our hard drive, enabled automatic update of virus definitions (part of setup), and had real-time enabled (Zone Alarm refers to this as On-Access scanning.) Zone Alarm also checks email attachments by default and uses heuristics for detection.

Resources:
We could identify only three processes running for Zone Alarm Antivirus, taking minimum resources of 40.5mb of system memory which is extremely impressive.

isafe 3.7mb

vsmon.exe 25.3mb

zlclient.exe 11.5mb

Total = 40.5mb

Zone Alarm Antivirus takes 8.5mb of hard drive space, add runs an extremely fast detection engine, vsmon.exe. During our scan it tool 25% average CPU utilization to scan a 6gig drive in thirteen minutes, which is smoking fast.

Ability:
Here is the dissapointing part of the Zone Labs antivirus application, it caught only 4 of 10 viruses in real-time detection. During the full system scan, it still missed the remaining six. We verified the applicaiton was up to date. This detection rate is way to low to consider making Zone Alarm Antivirus a consideration for protecting a computer. Below is the matrix of which viruses it found, and unfortunately missed.

	Real-Time	Full Scan
CyberTake Backdoor	No	No
CryptoC Virus	Yes	Yes
Ghostdog DoS	No	No
Popcorn Exploit	No	No
WebHack Hack	No	No
Sinmsn IM Worm	Yes	Yes
Bacterio61 Trojan	No	No
Diablo21 Trojan	No	No
VChain Virus	Yes	Yes
Foxma Worm	Yes	Yes

(Real-Time: This is the preferred detection method. The virus was stopped as it entered the computer, before it planted itself onto any media such as the hard drive. Full Scan: The virus planted itself onto the media of the computer such as a folder on the hard drive and was found during a scheduled Full Scan. NA means the Full Scan was not needed.)

Price:
$19.95 for a one year subsciption, and does come with firewall.

Support:
You get Virtual Support (computer answers), FAQs, and Forums for free. And technical phone support is available for $2.95.

Other Notes:
We were surprised the Zone Alarm Antivirus found a private network and asked if it should protect it as though it was public, or allow sharing.

Byte-level scanning is also available in the Advanced Options under Detection. This is not turned on by default due to the performance hit your computer will likely take from the in depth review of every byte of data. But it is a very powerful option to have on a temporary basis after a major infection.

Ability:

Install/Config:

Price:

Resources:

Support:

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