history of bitdefender

BitDefender®is the creator of one of the industry's fastest and most effective lines of internationally certified security software.

Since its inception in 2001, BitDefender® has continued to raise the bar to set new standards in proactive threat prevention.

BitDefender® made its entrance on the international market when opening its own offices in Germany, Spain, USA and the UK. The company’s global expansion plans are still underway as BitDefender® is strengthening its position based on a series of strategic partnerships. Moreover, BitDefender is also setting sail for Asia.

The BitDefender® proprietary technologies, based on innovative ideas and trends in the information security industry, have been internationally avowed by authorized organizations, which rewarded their outstanding results by numerous prizes and certifications (Av-Test.org, Virus Bulletin, ICSA lab, Checkmark, IST Prize etc). BitDefender® is the only South- Eastern European company to have received the European IST Prize for innovation from the European Commission and the representatives of 18 European academies. In 2008, BitDefender was rated #1 for protection by Consumer Reports, the largest consumer reporting publication worldwide. The BitDefender 2009 suite earned high marks in the product reviews conducted by top consumer and technology testers worldwide.

Every year, BitDefender® launches a new generation of its desktop product line and its issues patches for its corporate suites, adding new functionalities based on innovative technologies. In 2006, BitDefender® introduced B-HAVE (Behavioral Heuristic Analyzer in Virtual Environments), its proprietary heuristic detection technology. Same year, NeuNet, the new heuristic detection technologies was integrated in the BitDefender® solutions. Also the Spam Image Filter, an important step in fighting the new spamming techniques is now part of the BitDefender® antispam engines. In 2007 BitDefender® presented its new mobile security solution - providing real-time antivirus protection for mobile devices (smart phones and PDAs). In 2008 BitDefender partnered with SOS Online Backup, a leader in online data loss prevention, in order to provide an integrated online storage, backup, and recovery solution to protect business and consumer customers against data loss.

Every day, BitDefender® protects tens of millions of home and corporate users across the globe — giving them the peace of mind of knowing that their digital experiences will be secure. The BitDefender® solutions are distributed by a global network of value-added distribution and reseller partners in more than 100 countries worldwide. More information is available on our security solutions' site.

BitDefender E-Threats Landscape Report

The purpose of this report is to provide a comprehensive investigation of the threats’ landscape. BitDefender®’s security experts thoroughly analyze and examine the menaces of the each semester, focusing on software vulnerabilities and exploits, different types of malware, as well as countermeasures, cyber crime prevention and law enforcement. The E-Threats Landscape Report concentrates mainly on the latest trends, but it also contains facts and data and concerning the previously investigated periods, as well as several predictions related to the upcoming semesters. This document is primarily intended for IT&C System’s Security Managers, System and Network Administrators, Security Technology Developers, Analysts, and Researchers, but it also addresses issues pertaining to a broader audience, like small organizations or individual users concerned about the safety and integrity of their networks and systems.

Download now H1 2009 Malware and Spam Review Executive Summary.pdf

First Half’s Spotlight E-Threats

During the first half of 2009, the most important security incident was triggered by the emergence and expansion of the Downadup / Conficker / Kido internet worm exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft operating systems prior to Windows Vista.

The MS08-067 vulnerability allowed Downadup to infect about 11 million computers worldwide during the first half of 2009. The infection is still in the wild, with hundreds of systems compromised on a daily basis.

Other significant malware vectors were leaked, unofficial distributions of Microsoft’s upcoming technologies: Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. Malware writers relied on kits infected with Trojans in order to infect unwary users leeching these novelties via Bit-Torrent.

* ATM malware spotted in the wild: Trojan.Skimer.A targets automated teller machines from US manufacturer Diebold. The malicious application creates a virtual 'skimmer' which is capable of recording card details and personal identification numbers without the user's knowledge.

* Fake disinfection tools for the Downadup Internet worm: building on the pandemics triggered by the Downadup worm (about 11 million infections to date), malware authors released fake disinfection tools for the worm that actually would drop miscellaneous malicious files, especially rogue security software.

* Spam has grown to new heights with Canadian Pharmacy ranking as number one spam source.

o Medicine Spam – 519

o Product Spam (replica products) – 6%

o Hardcore pornography – 3%

o Phishing attempts – 7%

o Bundled malware – 6%

* Phishing and identity theft affect about 55,000 computer users per month. The most targeted financial institutions are Bank of America, Paypal and Abbey Bank.

* The first proof-of-concept rootkit targeting the upcoming Windows 7 operating system from Microsoft has been thoroughly documented and licensed under GPL license.

* MAC OS X scareware also witnessed a dramatic boost, indicating that it’s time of Apple users to adopt a platform-specific security solution.

* Social networking and microblogging have also contributed to leveraging social engineering attacks. Apparently harmless games posted on Twitter exposed sensitive credentials allowing attackers to recover victims’ passwords for miscellaneous web services.

Future Outlook

Malware development is a rapidly evolving business, both because this specific niche of software programmers are driven by illicit financial gains and because of technology’s rapid evolution.

Most software companies run an extremely tight schedule from envisioning their products to actually delivering them to their users, in order to maximize sales. However, many times, such applications are not fully tested and proofed against various types of attacks or critical coding flaws. Malware authors rely on these flaws to envision novel approaches for penetrating users’ systems in both home and corporate environments.

Malware distribution via Warez website and torrent downloads will keep an ascending pace as the number of Internet users increase. The so-called “nulled” PHP scripts used for creating virtual communities often contain backdoors allowing unauthorized third parties to seize control over web servers and host malware or use them as spam relays.

Other vulnerable factors in malware distribution schemes are the very end-users – their lack of awareness on the latest trends in the malware landscape can dramatically impact on both their budget and privacy.

Voluntary disclosure of trivial information via Web 2.0 websites or blogging platforms can also help malicious third parties build personal profiles or gather additional data to be used in phishing attempts.

Rank 1# antivirus 2009

If you’re looking for absolute PC protection from viruses and more, you can’t go wrong with our “TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award” winning software BitDefender Antivirus. Offering rock-solid security, simple usability, effective use of resources, and a valuable pricetag, BitDefender Antivirus 2010 is the best antivirus software solution we’ve seen. The 2010 edition builds on the already great program and adds some additional features that continue to improve overall PC performance and protection.

As online threats continue to evolve and target different vulnerabilities, BitDefender has grown their arsenal and is utilizing the most up-to-date technologies to combat viruses and other malware. BitDefender Antivirus 2010 offers a robust set of features and utility, but is flexible enough to meet the needs of various users. Whether you’re an advanced user looking to control the whole process manually, or a novice looking for a set-and-forget solution, BitDefender delivers an easy to use security solution.

In short, BitDefender Antivirus 2010 provides protection and peace of mind, without upsetting your PC performance or paycheck.

BitDefender Antivirus 2010 Standout Features:

• Realtime protection
• Advanced heuristic Active Virus Control
• Intrusion Detection
• Optimized scanning
• Easy on system resources

For additional security (antispam, firewall, parental controls), consider upgrading to BitDefender Internet Security, or the complete super-suite BitDefender Total Security (includes PC tune-up tools, data backup, a file shredder and more).

history of google

Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford^[1] working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library." and was funded through the National Science Foundation among other federal agencies. In search for a dissertation theme, Page considered—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got") and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind). In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.^[2] Brin was already a close friend, whom Page had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus.Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, setting out from Page's own Stanford home page as its only starting point. To convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm. Analyzing BackRub's output—which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance—it occurred to them that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page). A small search engine called RankDex was already exploring a similar strategy.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. By early 1997, the backrub page described the state as follows:

Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996)
Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes
...

BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.

-Larry Page page@cs.stanford.edu

Originally the search engine used the Stanford website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 4, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.

Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an "advertising funded search engines" model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students. However, they soon changed their minds and early on allowed simple text ads.

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol," which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros (although Enid Blyton used the word decades earlier in "Google Bun" - Chapter IX, The Magic Faraway Tree). Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb, "google," was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning, "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."^[14][15]

By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages. The home page was still marked "BETA", but an article in Salon.com already argued that Google's search results were better than those of competitors like Hotbot or Excite.com, and praised it for being more technologically innovative than the overloaded portal sites (like Yahoo!, Excite.com, Lycos, Netscape's Netcenter, AOL.com, Go.com and MSN.com) which at that time, during the growing dot-com bubble, were seen as "the future of the Web", especially by stock market investors.

In March 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 1999.^[18] The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has since become known as the Googleplex (a play on the word googolplex, a 1 followed by a googol of zeros). In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million.

The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and click-throughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture Services, before being acquired by Yahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo! Search Marketing).^] While many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.^[1]

Google's declared code of conduct is "Don't be evil", a phrase which they went so far as to include in their prospectus (aka "red herring" or "S-1") for their IPO, noting, "We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."