Hackers takeover Twitter.com for a short time

Followers of any number of celebrities, pundits, sports stars and even the guy or girl next door who headed over to the Twitter website were redirected to a web page for a group calling itself the "Iranian Cyber Army," as hackers hijacked the popular microblogging community's website recently. The attackers apparently were able to redirect Twitter users by stealing the credentials needed to administer the domain name system (DNS) records for Twitter.com, several reports indicated. Twitter acknowledged the incident via a blog posting on its website. "As we tweeted a bit ago, Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed," the post said. Twitter's DNS service is provided by Manchester, New Hampshire-based Dyn. Tom Daly, chief technology officer at Dyn, told the Washington Post that the incident was not the result of a security failure on its services. Daly said it appears someone changed Twitter's DNS records to point visitors to a different Internet address using the proper account credentials assigned to Twitter. It remains still unknown who was responsible or how the user name and password needed to change Twitter's DNS records were intercepted.

U.S. shifts stance and meets with Russia to discuss cyber safety

In the face of growing attacks on government and corporate websites and networks, former rival nations are teaming with the United Nations in secret talks he talks, aimed at finding ways of strengthening internet security and limiting the military use of cyberspace, according to a report in the New York Times. There has been increasing worries by the Obama administration that countries are developing cyber weapons that can be deployed against online targets to disable critical computer networks that control power stations or government departments as well as other threats, which has led to the increased willingness of the U.S. to come to the table to talk about the growing cyber threats. Prior to these talks, the Russians have argued that an international treaty, similar to that used to limit the spread of nuclear and chemical weapons, could also be used to see off the challenges military cyber activity poses to the civilian internet. But the United States has disagreed, saying the virtual world is blurry at best in assessing the potential uses of technology. The United Nations talks will resume in January, and both the U.S. and Russia plan to attend an internet security conference in Germany later in the year.

Ascentive Software statement regarding Automatic Renewal Emails

During the weekend of Dec 11th to Dec 13th, a subscription auto-renewal email was accidentally sent to everyone in the Ascentive email database. This database includes not only current and former customers but also recipients who have received any information from us in the past.

The email, which was only meant for a small number of our subscription users, has caused confusion and distress among a considerable number of people who received this email. Ascentive would like to assure both current and former customers who are not part of the subscription service that their credit card will not be billed at this time and there is no need to contact Ascentive customer support to cancel the renewal.

Ascentive is fully CAN-SPAM compliant and maintains an up-to-date list of opted out e-mail addresses which have been previously sent promotional advertisements and then requested removal from our email list. For anyone who received the email and has previously un-subscribed from our email list, they will not receive any additional promotional emails beyond this matter from Ascentive moving forward.
We offer our apologies for the error and are working to address the technical issue to ensure this does not happen again in the future.

Beware where you surf to keep your PC safe from malware

Surfing the internet is getting riskier for those looking to avoid getting a virus, downloading malware or trying to protect their computer's speed and safety, according to McAfee's third annual Mapping the Mal Web report. Of 27 million websites and 104 top-level domains researched, McAfee found that 1.5 million sites, or 5.8 percent, were risky. That's up from 4.1 percent from the past two years. Domains from the small African nation of Cameroon reached the top spot this year with 36.7 percent of its sites posing a security risk. Because .cm is often a typo for .com, McAfee said, cybercriminals like to use that domain to set up typo-squatted sites to hit you with malware. Even if you type it correctly the .com domain isn't much safer, rocketing from ninth last year to second this year in riskiness, with 32.2 percent of its sites potentially hazardous to PC health. Romania (.ro) was tagged as the riskiest domain for malicious downloads, with 21 percent of its sites delivering payloads of viruses, spyware, and adware. McAfee sees the .info domain as the most spam-filled with 17.2 percent of its sites generating junk mail.

Perimeter E-Security exposes top 10 biggest computer security breaches of 2009

Perimeter E-Security, announced the top 10 biggest cyber information security breaches and blunders of 2009. According to chief technology officer, Kevin Prince, there is a common thread between all of these incidents: they could have been avoided.

"2009 has been a year full of data breaches, compromises and exposures all around cyber-criminality. These incidents could have been prevented by adopting basic security standards and embracing a culture of security," said Prince. "Most companies actually know exactly where they lack security and where their gaps and exposures are."

The list is lead by one of the nation's leading payment processors, with official court proceedings report that 130 million records were compromised, E-Security said.

Following that company were social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, which have had security breaches ranging from individual accounts being compromised to various phishing and virus issues, with more expected in 2010.

Some of the others making the not-so-desirable list were California University (160,000 records hacked), Virginia Department of Health (hackers demanded $10 million dollars ransom for the return of records) and a man who sent spyware to his girlfriend, who opened the email on her work computer resulting in a data security breach on a major children's hospital network.

Hackers, malware and inappropriate user behavior among threats to federal IT security

So you think your home computer is at risk of cyber attacks, spam, malware and more? Try defending the federal IT infrastructure. CDW Government, Inc. (CDW-G) released its 2009 Federal Cybersecurity Report, which found that across 300 Federal, civilian and Department of Defense agencies, the number and severity of cybersecurity incidents has stayed the same or increased in the last year. Respondents said external sources are the biggest threat overall, with defense agencies indicating state-sponsored cybersecurity-warfare as the most significant external issue. For civilian agencies hackers are among the biggest external challenges, while internal threats such as inappropriate web surfing and loss of computing devices continue to leave agencies vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. "Fundamentally, cybersecurity is not just a technology issue - it is a management and cultural challenge for Federal agencies," said Andy Lausch, vice president of federal sales for CDW-G. He added that Federal IT security professionals need the participation of the employees, managers and senior staff that they support to reduce the threat. The top problem found in the survey was malware (33 percent of respondents), followed by inappropriate network use or activity by employees (25 percent), supervision of authorized, distantly-placed user access (25 percent) and encrypted data (23 percent).

Bargain-priced graphics card released for holiday season

Windows users in search of a gaming speed upgrade for a reasonable price can look no farther than Nvidia's new GeForce GT 240 graphics card, which packs a number of high-end features into a package with an unusually low sticker price. The GT 240 is available with a number of options, and buyers will have to choose between 512 and 1024 MB of RAM, as well as the data rate at which that RAM works (either 2000 MHz DDR3 or 3400 MHz DDR5). The central processor of the GT 240 is a 550 MHz, 40 nm-scale graphics processing unit (GPU). The GT 240 could inject new life into older PCs with dated graphics hardware. The device promises significant video performance boosts as well, due to much-improved Blu-Ray performance and support for Flash 10.1, which will soon be the dominant format for streaming video services like Hulu. Competition between the big two graphics card makers - Nvidia and ATI - has helped keep prices reasonable in recent years, according to analysts. Nvidia's products tend to be seen as more widely compatible with other hardware, while ATI holds a perceived advantage in value for performance.

AMD, Intel settle five-year lawsuit for $1.25 billion

The world's top two makers of microprocessors yesterday announced that they had come to a settlement of a long-running antitrust suit, with AMD agreeing to drop all litigation against Intel in exchange for a $1.25 billion payout. Some experts say that the settlement will likely mean little to the end-user of the products manufactured by the company. Erica Ogg, writing for CNET, says that observant shoppers may notice a slight increase in the use of AMD chipsets in new computer models this holiday season as Intel stops punishing manufacturers for using AMD products. Ogg also writes that computer prices in general could rise slightly as a result of the settlement, as competition between the two microchip makers cools from its previous incendiary levels, but that AMD will likely remain the budget option while Intel retains its role as the maker of premium CPUs. Suits against Intel filed by EU regulators and the state of New York are unaffected by the settlement, although AMD's original suit was the impetus for the EU filing in 2004.

Solid-state hard drives coming into their own

Flash storage has been in use for years in portable devices and thumb drives, but not until recently has it been implemented effectively for the full-scale PC. The basic technology, according to Ars Technica, has existed for decades, but technical issues - such as the whole device burning out after a few days of use - have understandably delayed widespread adoption of the technology. The enormous gulf in price between flash storage and traditional models has also helped delay the solid-state drive. However, the day of the SSD may be near. More and more PC models offer SSDs in their laptop and desktop PCs, and the price is dropping rapidly. The SSD has numerous advantages over traditional hard drives, as well: It has no moving parts to get damaged in a fall, it uses far less energy than a standard drive, and it can access data much faster. In the long term, Ars Technica predicts that SSDs will soon supplant traditional models in personal computers, but also that standard hard drives could remain the solution of choice for low-cost mass storage where access speed is less important.

Asus rolls out new motherboards supporting USB 3.0 protocol

Microchip maker Asus earlier this week revealed that it will begin selling a motherboard with built-in support for the new USB 3.0 data transmission framework next month. USB 3.0 is said to be able to transfer data up to 10 times faster than the current USB 2.0 standard.

The Asus Xtreme Design P7P55D-E Premium also has a pair of SATA 6 GB per second ports, and will support the use of Intel's latest line of processors, the Core i7, i5, and i3. The new motherboard could be an improvement for all manner of performance benchmarks, from data transfer to internet speed. Information Week says that a 20 GB high-def movie could be transferred between devices in about 70 seconds with USB 3.0 technology.

The P7P55D-E Premium will also support the latest DDR3 class of system memory, further boosting performance in Windows. In addition to the new super-fast USB ports, the motherboard will sport a total of 10 of the older USB 2.0 ports.

PC users looking for a speed boost should also perform a computer check to make sure that their PC is running at its best possible speed.

Ascentive Blog now your source for Technology Imformation

Today the Ascentive Blog will begin frequent updates with interesting and helpful technology related articles. Check out our blog regularly for the latest news.

Ascentive Customer Support Grows to Match Customer Demand

Ascentive Software LLC (owners of FinallyFast.com) announced today the launch of a dedicated Customer Support Center (http://www.ascentive.com/support/index.php) to provide customers with a one stop location for Product User Guides, Frequently Asked Questions, solutions to common problems, and a listing of common error messages. The Customer Support Center provides product support for the following Ascentive Software Applications: PC Speedscan Pro, ActiveSpeed, PC Scan & Sweep, Spyware Striker Pro, WINRocket, RAMRocket, Greenlight Guardian, BeAware Home Edition and BeAware Corporate Edition.

To match a rapid increase in demand for our products due to the popularity of our website Finally Fast com and our PC Speedscan Pro application, Ascentive is committed to increasing our support capabilities to enhance our users’ experience.

Customer Service Hours have recently been expanded to include weekend Email and Live Chat Support from 9am - 5pm EST on Saturdays and Sundays. Weekday Customer Support Hours are from 9am – 6pm EST and include support by Phone, Email and Live Chat.

Visit www.FinallyFast.com today for more details.

Ascentive Software launches AscentiveNews.com to keep customers informed

Keeping informed on the latest ways to maintain your PC is essential to having a reliable computer that is ready to go when you need it.

Today Ascentive LLC, with its consumer products PC SpeedScan Pro, ActiveSpeed, PC Scan and Sweep, Spyware Striker and BeAware Monitoring Software, launched a new information website to compliment this blog and help keep customers up to date.

Ascentivenews.com will offer the latest press releases and articles on topics including Ascentive software product updates, Ascentive company news, industry information and updates on FinallyFast.com and related featured sites. Ascentive News also features links to related websites including the Ascentive homepage, the Ascentive Affiliate Blog and the Ascentive Access Center.

Visit www.AscentiveNews.com today for all the latest on Ascentive related news.

Ascentive awarded second Patent Approval from US Patent Office

Ascentive LLC (owners of FinallyFast.com) today announced their approval for a second US Patent. The patent which relates to online privacy protection is for a system that will allow users to rank cookies and web sites as a group in terms of privacy protection and use that to determine privacy settings in terms of sharing cookies with those web sites. For more information please see the following Patent Overview:
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=rEuGAAAAEBAJ

Ascentive’s previous patent was awarded in March 2009. That patent relates to Internet Security Monitoring and is for a client monitoring application that records and monitors human activity which is then forwarded to a supervisor server over a network. For more information places see the following Patent Overview: http://www.google.com/patents?id=inKWAAAAEBAJ&dq=ascentive

Ascentive Software Launches Official Blog

Welcome to the Official Ascentive Software Blog. This blog is your source for the latest Ascentive update about all our products including PC SpeedScan Pro (Featured on FinallyFast.com), ActiveSpeed, PC Scan & Sweep and Spyware Striker.

We will update blog regularly to help keep your informed.

Thanks for reading.