According to a study by McAfee, Katrina Kaif is the most dangerous celebrity in the Indian cyber space. While Katrina has a huge fan following and is one of the most searched celebrities on the Web, this would be an awkward sobriquet. She is followed by Deepika Padukone and Kareena Kapoor in the Most Dangerous Indian Celebrity’ revealed by McAfee after they researched popular culture’s most famous people to reveal the riskiest celebrity sportsmen, actors, and politicians across the Web.

The cyber criminals create malicious software and online threats designed to steal personal information around fans looking for results on search engines using strings such as name of celebrity’ combined with words like free downloads’, hot pictures’, screen savers’, and videos’.

“In a celebrity crazy country such as India, cyber criminals find it very lucrative to use the names of popular figures as keywords to lure people to websites with malicious software. This year’s study found movie stars top the most dangerouslist, while sports stars and politicians are among the safest.

- Venkatasubrahmanyam Krishnapur, Senior Director, McAfee India

The top 10 celebrities in India with the highest risk percentages are:

1. Katrina Kaif
2. Deepika Padukone
3. Kareena Kapoor
4. Saif Ali Khan
5. John Abraham
6. Priyanka Chopra
7. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
8. Bipasha Basu
9. Aamir Khan
10. Shah Rukh Khan

The study for Most Dangerous Celebrity’ used the McAfee SiteAdvisor site ratings which indicate the sites that are risky to search for celebrity names on the web and calculate an overall risk percentage. McAfee SiteAdvisor technology tests and rates nearly every trafficked site on the Internet and uses red, yellow and green icons to indicate the website’s risk level.

One of the biggest and boldest leaps in auto anti-theft security was the introduction of the automated tracking system, the earliest and most popular being the LoJack Vehicle Recovery System.

It was simple in premise: Auto owners attached this device to their vehicle, and should it be stolen, some desk-jockey at LoJack HQ could watch the little radar bleep via a screen and figure out the location of your ride.

The anti-theft idea spread out from only automobiles. Today, you can find anti-theft devices for your laptops, pets, and even your kids. And thanks to McAfee, you can now download a LoJack-like application that monitors your cell phone and keeps it safe.

McAfee has long been lauded as one of the premier providers of PC antivirus software, so it does make sense that the company would branch out and increase its brand to include Smartphone protection via its brand new WaveSecure app.

This move, of course, is strong evidence that PC-based companies like McAfee are turning their focus toward the rapidly expanding mobile market. Where PCs and laptops used to sell hand over fist, now it’s Smartphones flying off the shelves.

Sure, people might wait in line in their mock tent sidewalk cities to buy a Smartphone, but data suggests that around 15% of all cellular owners lose their phones in some fashion permanently, and even more misplace them from time to time.

The McAfee WaveSecure app not only ensures that your phone can be located if it is ever nabbed from you, but it also allows you to back up your important contacts (or to wipe them out completely), to restore your phone’s settings, to upload media securely, and much, much more.

WaveSecure is not the only anti-theft security application out there for Smartphones, but it is slated to be one of the most comprehensive applications and one of the most affordable.

For contrast, Lookout Mobile Security, which is a big-selling brand amongst Smartphone users, offers a free download to their users but then charges roughly $30/annually for a run-of-the-mill protection package. McAfee, on the other hand, provides much more coverage, many more options, and all for $19.99 from the Apple App Store.

McAfee is working hard to increase the profile of their mobile suite, and WaveSecure seems to be a legitimate step in the right direction.

For any Smartphone user out there, you know how important a little added security can be. Even if you closely guard your phone at all times, there’s always the risk of someone picking it up and checking out your personals. WaveSecure provides the peace of mind that most of us would greatly appreciate, and the tracking device added in is just a big bonus.

==== About the Author ====
This article was provided by Edward Cathill, lead writer at carinsurancelist.com  and other popular websites. Edward has been writing web articles for five years and tested many of today’s hottest apps for review.

Cameron Diaz is the top favorite celebrity on the Internet when it comes to malware. Security company McAfee recently conducted a study in which, Cameron Diaz turned out to be the name associated with malware at large. It is a hot favorite for attracting traffic and the success rate, as projected by McAfee is a whooping one in ten when considering search results.

The search result was tested for the term “Cameron Diaz and screensavers”. McAfee researched the results returned for the names of celebrities, politicians and numerous other famous personalities. The data was estimated by comparing stats from McAfee SiteAdvisor against a search term.

SiteAdvisor provides content advice for websites like presence of malware. The earlier record was held by Jessica Biel who dropped to third place this year. Julia Roberts took second place while Brad Pitt, at 10th position was the first man. As evident from this, men are more  susceptible  to getting affected by malware.

The news of  McAfee being acquired by Intel gained pace recently and you can get more on it from this earlier coverage. With this acquisition, Intel is not only acquiring a security firm but also a huge data powerhouse in the form of the SiteAdvisor. Let us see what Intel cooks up with McAfee.

(Source)

In an interesting move, Intel has announced that it will be buying the security software firm McAfee for $7.68 billion. This acquisition comes close on the heels of McAfee’s acquisition of tenCube – the developer of WaveSecure.

At first glance this might appear to be a strange acquisition, given that Intel is mainly a hardware manufacturer, whereas McAfee is a software developer. However, as Intel goes on to explain in the following statement, McAfee will help Intel in its goal of providing on-chip security.

The acquisition reflects that security is now a fundamental component of online computing. Today’s security approach does not fully address the billions of new Internet-ready devices connecting, including mobile and wireless devices, TVs, cars, medical devices and ATM machines as well as the accompanying surge in cyber threats. Providing protection to a diverse online world requires a fundamentally new approach involving software, hardware and services.

The price offered by Intel amounts to $48 per share, which is a 60% premium on the value of McAfee’s stock. Intel obviously wants McAfee pretty desperately, since McAfee hasn’t traded at the quoted price since 1999. The acquisition will make McAfee a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel and is expected to be finalized after shareholder approval, regulatory clearances and other customary conditions specified in the agreement.

Windows XP users, be warned. If you are using McAfee Antivirus, then do not apply DAT update 5958. Apparently, this update causes McAfee to delete svchost.exe, which in turn sets off a chain of events that ends up messing up Windows XP installations. Affected systems will display the following error message and automatically initiate a system restart.

If you have already installed DAT update 5958, then it is best to perform a rollback (from Tools–>Rollback DAT). In the meantime, exercise caution if you get any alerts related to the detection of W32/Wecorl.a. In all likelihood, it is a false positive that can brick your system. If case your system has already been affected, you can stop the infinite restart loop by entering shutdown a in the Run command box (Win+R).

Bungled McAfee updates are nothing new. However, this is obviously a big screw up. At the moment, McAfee is undoubtedly working behind the scenes to rush through a fix. However, even that may be too late, as possibly thousands of perplexed users worldwide have already been affected by this glitch.

image courtesey: ChevyGuys.com

Update: The update has now been pulled from McAfee’s servers. Here is the statement McAfee issued to Engadget:

McAfee is aware that a number of customers have incurred a false positive error due to incorrect malware alerts on Wednesday, April 21. The problem occurs with the 5958 virus definition file (DAT) that was released on April 21 at 2.00 PM GMT+1 (6am Pacific Time).

Our initial investigation indicates that the error can result in moderate to significant performance issues on systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3.

The faulty update has been removed from McAfee download servers for corporate users, preventing any further impact on those customers. We are not aware of significant impact on consumer customers and believe we have effectively limited such occurrence.

McAfee teams are working with the highest priority to support impacted customers and plan to provide an update virus definition file shortly. McAfee apologizes for any inconvenience to our customers

According to early speculation, the number of affected system should be in hundreds of thousands. At the moment, the very least McAfee can do is acknowledge the gravity of their mistake. Bricking a system is not equivalent to causing moderate to significant performance issues.

Recently, I wrote about Secunia’s Online Software Inspector. It scanned my netbook and found several programs that it believed were out of date. As you probably know, out of date programs can give hackers an easy way to gain access to a PC. One of the programs I needed to update was Adobe Acrobat Reader.

I went to the Adobe site to get the latest updated version and while there, I saw an offer for a free copy of McAfee’s Security Scan Plus. I had never heard of it before, and my curiosity would not let me pass it up.

The McAfee product installed right after Adobe finished. A few days later, I finally got around to trying it out. Here’s the first thing you will see upon launching it. It’s a simple welcome screen, nothing more.

Next, you’ll see that you must update this product in order to use it.

The update didn’t take long and they provided an interesting animation while I waited.

Next it started scanning my PC. I was anxious to see the results at this point.

URL Shortening services are quite the rage because of social networking sites like Twitter. However, these shortened URLs could be deadly, at-least for your computers.

According to a new study by McAfee, who are one of the top security software vendors, shortened URLs will be the heavy target for Cyber criminals on sites like Twitter and Facebook in 2010.

Over the past decade, we’ve seen a tremendous improvement in the ability to successfully monitor, uncover, and stop cybercrime,said Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Labs. We’re now facing emerging threats from the explosive growth of social networking sites, the exploitation of popular applications and more advanced techniques used by cybercriminals, but we’re confident that 2010 will be a successful year for the cybersecurity community.

In addition to that McAfee also has raised equal threat levels for Adobe Reader and Flash, which are one of the most exploited end-user software. One interesting point in the study is the prediction that HTML5 will induce more attacks, and entice more rogue sites, due to the fact that it is cross-platform and will help them attack more users. McAfee also says that web based OS such as Google Chrome OS would make malware creators shift towards attacking the web more than desktop users.

The release of Google Chrome OS and the technological advancements of HTML 5 will continue to shift user activity from desktop to online applications, creating yet another opportunity for malware writers to prey on users. HTML 5′s anticipated cross-platform support also provides an additional motivation for attackers, enabling them to reach users of many mainstream browsers.

Some points from the McAfee study say this about the threats in 2010:

• Social Networks Will Be Platform of Choice for Emerging Threats
• Cybercriminals Continue to Target Adobe Reader, Flash
• Web Evolution Will Give Cybercriminals New Opportunities to Write Malware
• Banking Trojans, Email Attachments Delivering Malware Will Rise in Volume, Sophistication
• Botnet Infrastructure Shifts from Centralized Model to Peer-to-Peer Control

In a recent show of Gillmor Gang, John Borthwick, the founder of Betaworks, which also owns Bit.ly, said that they generate more than 80 million clicks in 24 hours. Imagine the number of clicks generated by all of them combined and the security risks it presents users with.

Several prominent services like Bit.ly and TinyURL have their own security measures in place, however, to be on the safer site and ensure your online security, make sure to always update your browser and computer, and use security software on your PC.

Many web browsers like Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer 7 and 8 provide additional measures to block suspicious sites, if you are using an older browser it is highly advisable to upgrade it to the latest one.

If you do not want to download Panda Internet security 2010 or have not attended a Windows 7 launch party, and thus became illegible for a free Kaspersky version, we came across another giveaway, where you can download McAfee Internet Security worth $69.99 for free with a 1 year license.

This offer, is only available for current Bank of America customers. If you have an account with them, visit this BOA McAfee offer page and select your state. You will be redirected to the offer page, where you will have to login using your BOA ID.

Once you have logged in and entered your Site key, you will be shown links to go to the McAfee site from where you can download the Internet Security Software.

Clicking on the link will take you to the McAfee page, where you will need to create a new account to be able to download the software. Please note, you will need to provide your billing information while signing up. However, your credit card will not be charged and you can cancel the automatic subscription anytime before the 12-month free subscription expires. Enjoy.

There is still a couple of days more, before you can download ZoneAlarm Pro 2010 for free. However, if you are looking to download a suitable internet security software for free, we have another good deal for you.

McAfee is offering users with a 6 month free trial version of McAfee Internet security 2010 with Site Advisor, valid for 3 users.

McAfee Internet Security with SiteAdvisor is a proactive 10-in-1 always-updating security bundle that protects what you value with multi-user child safety, identity theft prevention, email and IM protection, and automated back-up. It gives you the confidence to surf the web, shop, bank, email, chat, and download files safely and securely.

To avail of this offer, visit the McAfee offer site and click on the Try now button and sign up for a new account. Once you have signed up, you will be take to a page to confirm your order.

Click on the download link, to download McAfee Internet Security 2010 with Site Advisor to your PC. You can use the security software free on up-to 3 PCs for 6 months.

McAfee Avert Labs Blog just announced that the Koobface worm has reached Twitter. Appearantly, users are sent fake tweets with a video link and once they click on that they are prompted to download a video codec. However, instead of downloading a video codec, the malware is downloaded to the hard drive. These variants have been detected as W32/Koobface.worm.gen.e and W32/Koobface.worm.gen.h by McAfee.

What to do if you get a video link? Don’t download anything it prompts you for!