Kaspersky Lab welcomes greater online Facebook protection

Kaspersky Lab has welcomed latest moves by Facebook and CEOP (the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Service) to provide users of the social networking site a panic button app.
The app, which is designed to protect children who use the Facebook social networking site, is a good move says the IT security vendor, but there needs to be more education and vigilance in order to keep young people safe online.

Ram Herkanaidu, a member of Kaspersky's global research and analysis team, says that having a panic button is an important step, but it needs to be part of a wider education for both adults and children on how to keep them safe online. "It can be difficult for anyone, child or teenager, to know who online strangers really are, so it is important to understand the techniques used to attract young people and how to combat them", he said.

Against this backdrop, Kaspersky suggests all online users have a good internet security suite installed on their computer, with parental controls that can monitor youngsters' social networking interactions. And, says the IT security vendor, if need be, users should block messaging to certain users, as well as confidential information like the home address, phone numbers and other sensitive private data.

Parents, says Kaspersky, should always be attentive of how much your children use the internet and to whom they are speaking to and when. And parents, the IT security firm adds, should always investigate any new contacts, if they approach your child first.
Finally, says Herkanaidu, if your internet security has parental controls, you should make full use of them to examine your children's online activity and stop them from being groomed into giving personal information that could potentially put them in danger. Social networking websites, he says, are a modern cultural phenomenon. Facebook alone, for example, currently has over 300 million active users, 150 million of which log-on at least once a day

Kaspersky Lab Predicts Malware Epidemics

Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, has successfully patented technology in the USA that allocates the potential scale of malware epidemics to be accurately predicted in order to prevent them from spreading.
"The patented technology works by examining statistical data about threats received from a global monitoring network.
Emerging epidemics can be recognized by the number of incidents occurring during a specific period in one location or another. It makes it possible to pinpoint the source of an epidemic and forecast its likely propagation pattern.
Protective measures can then be implemented by countries in the path of the epidemic. This slows the proliferation rate considerably and offers effective damage limitation, according to chief intellectual property counsel Kaspersky Lab.
The technology has a number of advantages over other similar systems, including the ability to trace the source of the threat, generate protective measure and simulate the spread of an epidemic, she said.
Today's malware has the capacity to spread in millions of computers infected in an instant as an epidemic sweeps across the Internet. This can take down huge swathes of infrastructure, bringing information highways to a standstill and leaving systems vulnerable to data leakage which in turn opens the door to large scale fraud. Detecting malware on computer that is infected during an epidemic has little or no effect. What is needed is a reliable method for estimating the potential scale and direction of an epidemic, an early warning system, and that is exactly what the new technology developed by Kaspersky Lab's Yury Mashevsky, Yury Namestnikov, Nikolay Denishchenko and Pavel Zelensky, is capable of doing. The technology was granted Patent No. 7743419 by the US Patent and Trademark Office on 22 June, 2010.
Kaspersky Lab currently has more than 50 patent applications pending in the USA, Russia, China and Europe. These relate to a unique information security technologies developed by the Company's personnel.