Webware

As a followup to my post from Tuesday about the ability for someone to view porn from within Bing, I just heard from a Symantec spokesperson that the company's Internet monitoring and filtering service, OnlineFamily.Norton (review), can't yet prevent Bing users from searching sexually explicit terms for Web sites or videos. The company plans to add Bing to its protected search engines in the next release. Other major search engines, including Google, are covered by the software's SafeSearch feature.

In the meantime, Symantec recommends that parents use OnlineFamily.Norton to block access to all of Bing--which isn't particularly good for Microsoft.

OnlineFamily is a free Windows and Mac application that can be used to block sites and monitor a child's online behavior. Unlike some Internet-monitoring programs, it doesn't operate in stealth mode so, if parents use that feature, kids know that their Web activities are being watched.

Because Bing plays videos within its own site and doesn't require the user to click through, checking the browser history or using monitoring programs like OnlineFamily would only show that they visited Bing.com, not what videos they watched from within the site.

Editors' note: In the original version of this blog, we used the beta name for this product. The official name is OnlineFamily.Norton.

Back in February, Symantec debuted a new security program that sought to help parents talk to their kids about how they use the Internet. OnlineFamily.Norton has been a free beta since then, but this Monday at midnight, the program will leave beta and remain free at least until the end of 2009. The program was originally called Norton Family Online.

OnlineFamily.Norton makes your child's surfing habits available from any browser.

(Credit: Symantec)

This parental control suite provides parents with an interesting and possibly unique approach to online child safety. OnlineFamily.Norton does provide a blacklist, boilerplate for most parental control software. However, the suite offers more than just an On/Off switch, and provides tools that encourage communication between parents and their children.

There's a wide range of control over what sites a child can access. The restrictions can vary from a strict no-access policy that can block specific sites and site categories, to a more lenient notification e-mail sent to the parents when the child visits sites that parents merely want to be warned about. On the child's side, kids are given the option of e-mailing their parents when they're blocked--if the parents allow those e-mails in the first place.

Jody Gibney, product manager for OnlineFamily.Norton, said, "We want to encourage a different philosophical approach, encouraging parents to talk to kids instead of setting up an adversarial relationship." To further that, the program's House Rules can be customized to suit the needs of individual children within each family, a useful feature since a teenager will have different browsing and social-networking interests than an 8-year-old.

The dashboard for OnlineFamily.Norton will change slightly from the beta release, highlighting the options available to parents.

(Credit: Symantec)

It's impossible for a kid not to know that OnlineFamily.Norton is running on their computer's background, since it warns them that it's activated. The log-in process requires that the Norton Safety Minder for Windows and Mac be installed first. The program allows kids to view the House Rules independently of their parents. Parents, on the other hand, are able to see what sites their children have been visiting, including search results for terms the child has queried.

However, the program doesn't provide "reams and reams of information," as Gibney put it. "We want to provide [parents] with enough information to start a discussion without overwhelming them." The program will flag social-network profile inconsistencies, such as discrepancies in a child's stated age or name, for example.

The differences between the beta and the free version are apparently limited to interface enhancements designed to streamline the setup process and provide better access to the information that OnlineFamily.Norton collects. The free version will be available at midnight on Monday. A one-year subscription starting January 1, 2010, is expected to cost $60.

Update 11:45 a.m. PST: This blog incorrectly described part of what the link downloads. It downloads a Trojan horse. The link does not take viewers to a video.

Moving beyond Valentine's Day as a social-engineering theme, online criminals have started sending out e-mail with a supposed link to a recent interview with Sen. Hillary Clinton. Instead of a video, the link downloads a Trojan horse onto the viewer's computer. Security experts predict 2008 presidential election e-mails and phishing sites will continue throughout the year.

On Thursday in Symantec blog, researcher Kelly Conley writes that the e-mail arrives with the subject line: Hillary Clinton Full Video !!! The body text reads, in part: "Hillary Clinton visited her Virginia campaign headquarters and did satellite interviews, looking beyond Tuesday's trio of contests..."

Often the malicious software is not within a video, but within the download link, as is the case here. Symantec says the link embedded within the e-mail downloads a suspect file, "mpg.exe," which is a Trojan downloader. This downloader then downloads inst241.exe, a file that Symantec detects as Trojan.Srizbi.

PCLive.com, a service offered by SecurityCoverage Inc., is attempting to upstage security giants Symantec and McAfee by offering a complete suite of security tools for your desktop--for free. Included within the basic PCLive Security package is a firewall, the open source ClamAV antivirus product, antispyware, a pop-up blocker, plus system cleaner (removes old temp files). PCLive will also check for the latest Microsoft Windows updates that haven't yet been applied to your PC. For a mere $4.95 a month, PCLive Premium Security includes all the basic PCLive Security along with Web content filtering, parental controls, disk maintenance and 24-7 live technical support. SecurityCoverage also offers users of their free PCLive service instant 24-7 technical support for a flat fee of $49.95 per session.

How does it work? OK. The ClamAV product is designed for UNIX and Linux systems. It hasn't been independently tested by Windows-based antivirus testing labs. Also we found that PCLive runs three active processes on your desktop. A couple of times, for no apparent reason, the PCLMonitorService process consumed up to 53 percent of our system resources, considerably slowing our test PC.

Our biggest complaint is a lack of detail on what's going on under the hood, such as a listing of what temp files, viruses, and spyware were removed. Upon installation, PCLive scanned and removed viruses and spyware from our test PC--without telling us what it removed. While there is an e-mail report of what the product has done on your PC, we'd like a little input on what's done on our computer. Same thing happened with an announcement that several hundred temp files had been removed. Not that we want to see every temp file, but we'd like to know in advance and approve any actions.

There are five tabs: Status, Security Scans, Settings, Forum support, and Upgrade. Opening the PCLive settings page is frustrating. There is no contextual Help, no Help file at all, meaning, it's hard to figure out what the setting options you have. Under firewall settings we checked "stealth mode." Other than getting a pop-up explaining that we might not be able to visit certain sites, there was no additional information on what "stealth mode" might or might not do. If you do tweak any of the PCLive settings, you can either save and you can close the app, but you can't intuitively get back to the main interface page.

Back on the Status tab, after choosing to update all the components, PCLive continued to show that we weren't fully updated. A second update proved successful, but that was a lucky guess on our part.

Should you decide to remove PCLive, there is an uninstall option on the All Programs menu. After a reboot, we found no traces of PCLive remaining on our test system.

Talk about viral marketing (or, in this case, antiviral marketing). Someone's gone and made a rap video about the Kaspersky Internet Security suite and posted it to YouTube. And they're not alone. Security vendor Kaspersky is running a contest in the U.S. and Canada asking you to make a video and then upload it to a special YouTube page with appropriate tags. Every entrant will receive a "I had worms" T-shirt from Kaspersky and also be entered into a grand prize drawing for a chance to win a trip to Russia, Las Vegas, or an ocean cruise. Runners-up will win either a 42-inch TV, an Apple iPhone, or a Sony Camcorder.

So far, there are only two professionally produced videos on the Kaspersky YouTube page. One is an older man and a younger man seated on a park bench with a bunch of pigeons.

The best, however, is a rap song, "Packin the K," which includes such memorable lines as:

"On hackers,
We put the hurt-sky
We use Kaspersky
We use the K!"

And this:

"When I'm packing the K
He's attacking like a dog
So you feel safe
When you're writing your blog"

Kaspersky isn't alone. Earlier this year, Symantec announced a funny face emoticon contest for its Norton 360 product. That context ends next Monday. The Kasperksy contest, which includes a starter kit of images for use in the video, runs until December 1, 2007.

These days, criminal enterprises don't just want to steal your Outlook contact list, they want to own your computer, and they will download a remote-access Trojan horse at the first available opportunity. Within the last six months, Symantec has seen the number of these "bot" infections increase 29 percent over the previous six months. That's why Symantec is rushing to market a new application they're calling Norton AntiBot.

While most antivirus applications today provide adequate protection against spyware and malware, once these are removed, your machine is vulnerable to new and different variations of the same. Say a site you visit has been compromised with a stealth-like IFrame that, each time you visit the page, downloads a different Trojan. Symantec has licensed new behavior-based technology that picks up on this activity and proactively protects your computer from repeat attacks.

Norton AntiBot is designed to complement Symantec's existing SONAR technology, a behavior-monitoring and blocking feature acquired from a company called Whole Security last year and currently available on Norton Antivirus, Norton Internet Security, and Norton 360.

The download for the public beta, along with appropriate caveats, can be found on the Symantec site. Information on price and final availability was not available at press time.

>> MTV online strategy to help Viacom take on YouTube? Viacom wants you to watch clips of its popular TV shows on the Internet, but it doesn't want you to do so on YouTube. At the beginning of this month, Viacom had YouTube take down more than 100,000 clips of Viacom-owned content. Now it's spreading them out among its sites, including ComedyCentral.com and MTV.com.

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>> Cisco's new security target: consumers. Cisco Systems makes products for large companies and businesses, but its marked 2007 as the year to move into the consumer arena for products for your home. Security is the name of the game, and Cisco steps into the ring with Symantec, McAfee, and others to vie for your home's Internet security needs.