Tuesday, December 20, 2005
11 out of 11 machines
When i was in Singapore for my holidays, some of my friends and relatives took "advantage" of my IT knowledge and dumped some PCs and laptops onto me.
All together, 11 machines were checked, and all 11 had tons of spyware, most of them have some trojans running, and there's one that was being used as a bot proxy of some sorts and was generating data transfers of gigs daily on his cable connection.
3 of them have expired AV packages from Symantec, as they were too cheap to renew their subscription. The others have nothing. No protection at all.
That's a sad state... or a show of the lack of awareness of AV among my friends. 8(.
For those that were willing to pay for something, i pushed them to Funan Center to grab some newer packages off the shelves.
Noticed F-Secure having a larger than previous presence in the local market. I dont recall seeing their products on retail before i left Singapore to Redmond. Symantec, McAfee, Trend, AhnLabs etc are all present too.
Perhaps their focus into mobile phone viruses allow them to get a bigger mindshare in a mobile phone crazy nation like Singapore... hmm?..
For the ones that aren't willing to pay for AV... i directed them to the various AV vendors with freeware versions.
In all instances, i forced them to install a firewall, an anti-spyware tool, an av tool, and for some of the folks, installed the other browser (ahem), made it the default, added plugins like No-Script etc and for one even installed the hosts txt file.
I also talked with one of my former manager who's currently based in Bangkok, Thailand doing Online Gaming. Apparently his business is one of the bigger ones in Bangkok and he was thinking of more business to do. I told him that perhaps he should start to think about doing retail/distribution of AV products with his service.. 8)
singapore
All together, 11 machines were checked, and all 11 had tons of spyware, most of them have some trojans running, and there's one that was being used as a bot proxy of some sorts and was generating data transfers of gigs daily on his cable connection.
3 of them have expired AV packages from Symantec, as they were too cheap to renew their subscription. The others have nothing. No protection at all.
That's a sad state... or a show of the lack of awareness of AV among my friends. 8(.
For those that were willing to pay for something, i pushed them to Funan Center to grab some newer packages off the shelves.
Noticed F-Secure having a larger than previous presence in the local market. I dont recall seeing their products on retail before i left Singapore to Redmond. Symantec, McAfee, Trend, AhnLabs etc are all present too.
Perhaps their focus into mobile phone viruses allow them to get a bigger mindshare in a mobile phone crazy nation like Singapore... hmm?..
For the ones that aren't willing to pay for AV... i directed them to the various AV vendors with freeware versions.
In all instances, i forced them to install a firewall, an anti-spyware tool, an av tool, and for some of the folks, installed the other browser (ahem), made it the default, added plugins like No-Script etc and for one even installed the hosts txt file.
I also talked with one of my former manager who's currently based in Bangkok, Thailand doing Online Gaming. Apparently his business is one of the bigger ones in Bangkok and he was thinking of more business to do. I told him that perhaps he should start to think about doing retail/distribution of AV products with his service.. 8)
singapore
