In this quick post, I wanted to deliver it a try to the IObit Malware Fighter software. I have to warn you a bit here, because when I have installed the Free version, it also installs two other software without my consent. (not very nice indeed). It also installs iTop VPN and iTop Screen Recorder. I do hope this happens ONLY with the free version. Anyway, two clicks and it's uninstalled if you don't need those. The reason I downloaded the product is that I wanted to have a look at their software and I know that IObit has many more products (Advanced system care etc…) you could be interested in. But let's start and delve into the product.

More and more Malware is around. That's a fact. Perhaps it is high time to get good anti-malware software. Let's see if the one from IObit is the one that stands up. Malware today, it's not only some bad guy's software running on your system. You need anti-phishing protection as those phishing attacks are more and more frequent and sophisticated. Ransomware is on the rise not only within the enterprise section, but touches SMBs, and individuals too.

Malware Fighter Pro is an award-winning antivirus software that protects your PC from various online threats, such as viruses, ransomware, spyware, trojans, adware, and worms. Malware Fighter Pro uses two antivirus engines, its own and Bitdefender, to detect and remove malware with high accuracy and speed. It also has a large anti-malware database that can detect over 200 million malware.

The software has multiple layers of protection for your PC and your privacy. It has a ransomware protection feature that prevents your files from being encrypted by hackers. It also has a privacy protection feature that allows you to lock your sensitive data with a password and block unauthorized access. Moreover, it has a webcam security feature that prevents intruders from using your webcam without your permission.

Malware Fighter Pro also enhances your browsing experience by keeping you away from phishing websites, malicious ads, and tracking cookies12. It also has a browser password guard feature that encrypts and protects your local browser password data from leaks. Malware Fighter Pro is easy to use and compatible with all versions of Windows OS. It has a user-friendly interface and a smart scan mode that can scan your PC in a few minutes. It also has a behavior guard feature that warns you of potential threats or suspicious activities in advance.

According to the official website of IObit Malware Fighter Pro, it uses two antivirus engines, its own and Bitdefender, to achieve a higher level of malware detection and removal. The IObit engine can detect and remove common malware, while the Bitdefender engine can handle more advanced and sophisticated threats. By combining these two engines, Malware Fighter Pro can provide comprehensive and reliable protection for your PC.

The free version enables you to have basic protection where not all areas of protection are active. Screenshot from the lab below.

You need to buy the Pro version to enable the Anti-ransomware engine, Bitdefender engine, MBR guard, USB disk guard, Behavior guard or browser password guard.

However, some experts advise against using more than one antivirus program on the same computer, as this can cause conflicts, performance issues, and false alerts. I don't think it is the case as the integration with Bitdefender is done internally so you don't need to run Bitdefender software and at the same time IObit software.

On the Toolbox menu, you can enable a Safe Box which can block access to some files/folders on your system. Also, you can see that a VPN system comes as an optional offer.

The menu on the left hand side has several sections. One of them is scan section.

Scan

You can initiate a Smart scan, Full Scan, or custom scan. Options that might be useful when suspecting that your system has a problem. You can drag and drop file onto the window and do a custom scan or execute full scan with a delete/clean action with shutdown at the end of the scan.

Example of custom scan with System Critical Areas and Suspicious processes…..

Browser protect

This menu is again, show what's protected and what's not. You can add Surfing protection or Anti-Tracking, within the pro version. Anonymous Online option is the iTOP VPN protection they have talked about in the beginning of the article. It's there.  If you don't have or use other VPN… why not? It's integrated somehow in the product where by clicking the link you get to the page with the offer and install it on your system.

Looks solid.

Overall, the software looks like destined for nonexperienced users who need to be carried by hand. It's simple to use and navigate through.

The IOBit Malware Fighter Pro has been here for a very long time. The first release was out back in 2010 so the product has a good background with a lot of experience under the belt. They cannot test the effectiveness of removals or detections, but it seems like a solid product that has its place here.

Take a look here – Malware Fighter Pro

Can I recommend using it? For sure I can. Except for the “forced install” the Malware Fighter is a good piece of software, but it's not alone within the security space. It's just one of them, with long experience in the field.

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‘There must be a new approach to cybersecurity – one that is built-in, unified and context-centric,” says VMware’s Chief Operating Officer Sanjay Poonen.

VMware’s popular VMware Cloud Foundation is receiving a major shot in the arm with new security capabilities from Carbon Black and NSX as the virtualization star continues its march to make security intrinsic in all its products.

At RSA 2020 conference on Tuesday, VMware unveiled that VMware Advanced Security for Cloud Foundation – which is the basis for offers such as VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Cloud on Dell EMC – will inject Carbon Black’s workload protection Real-time Workload Audit/Remediation technology as well as its Next-Generation Antivirus (NGAV) and Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) solutions.

Additionally, VMware’s NSX Advanced Load Balancer with Web Application Firewall capabilities and NSX Distributed IDS/IPS can be added to VMware Cloud Foundation deployments. The NSX and Carbon Black technology will integrate with VMware vSphere.

[Related: VMware Licensing VP: CPU Pricing Change Has ‘Zero Impact’]

For more than a year, VMware has had its sights set on disrupting the security industry by tightly integrating security into every product, a strategy it dubs as intrinsic security.

Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer, customer operations for VMware, said there has never been a more challenging time in security.

“Attacker sophistication, security threats, breaches, and exploits are becoming more prevalent with no end in sight. And with cloud, new applications, pervasive mobility, IoT, and data at the edge, the problem is only getting harder to solve. There must be a new approach to cybersecurity – one that is built-in, unified and context-centric,” Poonen said in a statement. “We believe the best strategy and approach is to make security intrinsic enabling organizations to leverage their infrastructure and its unique capabilities across any app, any cloud and any device to better secure the world’s digital infrastructure – from networks, to endpoints, to workloads, to identities, to clouds.”

VMware Carbon Black will be tightly integrated with VMware vSphere to create an agentless solution which eliminates the need to insert antivirus and other agents. VMware says endpoint telemetry will be managed and gathered via built-in sensors protected by the hypervisor.

Adding the scale-out software architecture of NSX Web Application Firewall to VMware Cloud Foundation will help confirm that web servers have enough compute capacity for maximum security filtering even under peak loads. VMware’s web application firewalls leverages its understanding of application, automated learning and app-specific rules to provide strong security with lower false positives.

Adding NSX Distributed IDS/IPS to Cloud Foundation environments will provide intrusion detection on many difference services to offer deeper visibility as well as enable advanced filtering to be applied to every hop of the application to reduce any blind spots.

In an interview with CRN last year, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said VMware has the ability to take the security market by storm.

“We have two assets that nobody else on the planet has. They have the VM. We’re building this intrinsically into the VM. A lot of problem with a lot of security today is they end up being agents that you add into the guest environment. If you’re an attacker, the first thing you do is turn off the agents. Right? Those techniques of turning off the agents or spoofing the agents, there’s probably 100 free kits you can get to do that. The VM can’t be turned off. This sits as a capability inside of the VM,” said Genslinger.

“[Then] with their NSX, I now have an enforcer point, where you can see the network traffic and see all of it from an application-centric [point of view]. So the VM is handing traffic into NSX and then to the microsegments -- there’s nothing else sitting in-between that. You don’t have to hairpin to some remote firewall or some other service. You have that explicit point right at connectivity into the networking layer that either gives you visibility of all traffic coming in or enforcement of traffic going out,” said Gelsinger. “Those are two very powerful points that they don’t think anybody else is anywhere close to us in being able to do those two things for very fundamental, technical and market-based reasons.”

VMware made a huge splash in the security market in October with the acquisition of endpoint security leader Carbon Black for a value of $2.1 billion.

In addition to the new security features on VMware Cloud Foundation announced at the RSA 2020 conference, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company launched new capabilities for the VMware Carbon Black Cloud.

VMware introduced automated correlation with MITRE ATT&CK framework Technique IDs -- a which is a list of common tactics, techniques, and procedures -- built into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud, allowing customers to discover potential threats and identify areas of improvements. Additionally, VMware Carbon Black will be adding malware prevention capabilities for Linux machines to enable customers to migrate away from other endpoint prevention solutions specific to Linux.

The RSA 2020 conference in San Francisco runs Feb. 24-28.

The 10 cybersecurity tools and products making noise in the market have emphasized workflow automation, asset protection and downtime minimization to better safeguard clouds, endpoints and mobile devices.

Securing The Future

See the latest entry: The 10 Coolest Cybersecurity Tools and Products in 2022 (So Far)

Vendors have spent the first half of 2020 advancing security everywhere from the cloud to the endpoint to mobile devices, debuting tools that quarantine and remove malicious attachments, deliver protection across public and private clouds, and protecting users against unsuitable and malicious web content.

Enhancements to security operations and intelligence have been a major area of focus thus far in 2020, with advancements around automating workflows to speed detection and response, delivering actionable insights to Boost asset protection, and minimizing downtime and restoring business operations.

Six of the 10 coolest cybersecurity tools and products of 2020 (so far) came from companies based in California, three came from companies based in other parts of the United States, and one came from a company based abroad. Read on to learn how suppliers have gone about making their cybersecurity portfolio even more solution provider friendly.

Cisco SecureX

Cisco SecureX was announced in February to provide more visibility across the entire security portfolio, delivering security analytics and automating workflows to speed threat detection and response. The platform unifies visibility across customers’ security portfolio in a cloud-native platform, delivering detection of unknown threats and policy violations via security analytics for more informed actions.

The platform automates common security workflows, including threat investigation and remediation, for more precise and efficient operations, according to Cisco. Cisco SecureX analyzes events and data across the enterprise, including from more than 150 million endpoints as well as network traffic from switches and routers, public clouds and private data center environments.

Within minutes, Cisco SecureX can identify who and what has been targeted and enable remediation using data enrichment across security products and threat intelligence feeds. The company said its new platform also brings the power of Cisco Talos threat analysts into the customer’s SOC to hunt for the latest threats.

CrowdStrike Endpoint Recovery Services

CrowdStrike Endpoint Recovery Services debuted in February and combines the power of the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, threat intelligence and real-time response to accelerate business recovery from cyber intrusions, the company said. The new service enables customers to rapidly mitigate security incidents and resume business operations with minimal interruptions, according to CrowdStrike.

CrowdStrike said Endpoint Recovery Services accelerates the standard life cycle of incident recovery, saving businesses from expensive downtime. Endpoint Recovery Services combines CrowdStrike Falcon, endpoint visibility from Threat Graph and experienced security analysts to ensure immediate attack disruption and comprehensive endpoint remediation, according to the company.

Endpoint Recovery Services stops attacks to minimize downtime and restores business operations without having to reimage or reissue endpoint devices, enabling customers to focus on recovering other critical business components. The initial phases of the service are focused on understanding the incident and deploying the Falcon platform without the need for on-premises visits or installations.

Cybereason Mobile & Cybereason Mobile MDR

Cybereason in April expanded its prevention, detection and response capabilities from traditional endpoints to mobile devices to allow customers to combat threats from a single console. Cybereason Mobile and Cybereason Mobile MDR provide more robust protection against mobile-centric threats like phishing than existing tools, which are typically more focused on setting policy than actual defense.

Cybereason Mobile deploys a sensor on mobile or point of sale devices to detect information and send it back to the company’s cross-correlation engine, allowing inferences to be drawn on the back end, according to the company. Cybereason said it’s looking to integrate and develop more sensors in point of sale and operational technology (OT) environment to drop more information back into its data lakes.

Meanwhile, the company said Cybereason Mobile MDR is a fully managed tool that provide around the clock monitoring and robust incident response capabilities for customers and partners lacking the skillset or manpower to support this through their own SOC (Security Operations Center). In fact, Cybereason said it can even help with deploying the sensors on employees’ mobile devices.

F5 Application Protection

F5’s Application Protection portfolio was unveiled in February to safeguard all applications without impacting the user experience or impeding the delivery of digital services from code to customer, the company said. The company said it has realized operational efficiencies by seamlessly enabling application security across multiple environments with consistent policies and controls.

F5 said its offerings guard against application threats such as application-layer denial of service, malicious scripting and injection attacks, with Shape Enterprise Defense mitigating attacks tied to app fraud and abuse. And the F5 identity-aware proxy enables single sign-on and multi-actor authentication policies to help organizations realize the benefits of modern authentication and authorization protocols.

The company also offers a managed service focused on DDoS through Silverline to help protect customers from volumetric or reflected amplification attacks. From there, F5’s intelligent threat services use advanced analytics to transform the data sets into tactical intelligence that is both relevant and consumable by portfolio services.

FireEye Mandiant Threat Intelligence Suite

The FireEye Mandiant Threat Intelligence Suite was introduced in February and offers incremental tiers of bundled offerings to help companies on their journey to intelligence-led security. The Intelligence Suite provides firms with a significant decision advantage to help reduce security risk whether security is someone’s part time job or the organizations already has a dedicated threat intelligence team in place.

Organizations are increasingly looking to reduce their risk and augment their security with external threat intelligence services, FireEye said. However, many organizations don’t know where to start, FireEye said, while others have jumped right in without understanding what threat intelligence they need or how it should be used, which too often makes the process both ineffective and costly.

The Mandiant Threat Intelligence Suite is available in standard, advanced and enterprise tiered bundles, according to FireEye. The company said its Mandiant Threat Intelligence subscriptions and services are intended to deliver organizations visibility and actionable insights to Boost their protection of assets, enhance the effectiveness of security programs and inform business risk assessments.

Fortinet FortiGate 1800F

Fortinet in February upgraded its network processor for the first time since 2012 to provide the building block for hyperscale applications, delivering performance and fast connections across the board, the company said. In fact, the FortiGate 1800 firewall with NP7 (network processor 7) technology is 14 times faster than the industry average for products at a similar price point, according to the company.

Firewalls traditionally sat on the perimeter of the network and were focused on protecting a single port at low speeds, processing information line by line to ensure rules were being applied consistently, Fortinet said. But NP7 is able to speed up the Fortinet 1800F to the point where it’s able to sit at the core of the network and support VXLAN by running every single port at light weight, the company said.

Fortinet started with the 1800F since it’s a midrange system with a single CPU and a single console, but as the company goes forward, it will move beyond the midrange systems and start to implement it across all firewalls. As that process begins over the next four months, the company said customers will be able to put firewalls in places they’ve never been.

Palo Alto Networks CN-Series

The Palo Alto Networks CN-Series is a containerized version of the company’s firewall that was unveiled in June to help network security teams ensure they’re compliant in container environments, and enable security at DevOps speed by speeding up the integration and provisioning process, according to the company.

Kubernetes is red hot right now, and Palo Alto Networks wanted a containerized form factor as part of their firewall to ensure both security and compliance. The CN-Series firewalls leverage deep container context to protect inbound, outbound and east-west traffic between container trust zones along with other components of enterprise IT environments, according to Palo Alto Networks.

The CN-Series can be used to protect critical applications against known vulnerabilities as well as both known and unknown malware until patches can be applied to secure the underlying compute resource. Applications are protected with the CN-Series in on-premise data centers like Kubernetes and RedHat OpenShift as well as the Kubernetes service from each of the big public cloud providers, the firm said.

Sophos Intercept X For Mobile

Sophos in January began protecting Chrome OS users against unsuitable and malicious web content for the first time with its rebranded Intercept X for Mobile offering. The new mobile security capabilities will address the huge explosion of Chromebooks in the education space and the emerging opportunity in the health care and general corporate spaces as the devices move upmarket and become more feature-rich.

Intercept X for Mobile can now determine if apps installed by students or teachers on Chrome OS devices have malicious intent or operate unethically through tactics such as “fleeceware,” according to Sophos. Fleeceware excels at exploiting loopholes in the rules of Apple’s App Store or Google Play to evade detection but behave in an unethical or deceptive manner.

Intercept X for Mobile scours App Store libraries to identify malicious activity, the company said, looking for apps that have been side-loaded onto a mobile device or smartphones that have been jailbroken to install an application. As hackers adapt new techniques in the mobile space to evade detection, Sophos said it is employing machine learning to identify things the company has never seen before.

VMware Advanced Security For Cloud Foundation

VMware Advanced Security For Cloud Foundation was announced in February to address internal data center security challenges and deliver unified protection across private and public clouds, the company said. The offering includes VMware Carbon Black Workload Protection, VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer with Web Application Firewall capabilities and VMware NSX Distributed IDS/IPS, VMware said.

The offering manages and gathers endpoint telemetry through built-in sensors protected by the hypervisor, meaning that attempts to gain root access and tamper with the product will be detected by the hypervisor. Meanwhile, the NSX Web Application Firewall uses a rich understanding of applications, automated learning, and application-specific rules to provide strong security with lower false positives.

In addition, VMware said the distributed architecture of NSX Distributed IDS/IPS enables advanced filtering to be applied to every part of the application, eliminating the blind spots associated with use of traditional perimeter security products. Policies are automatically generated and enforced on an application-specific basis, which VMware said lowers false positives.

Zix Secure Cloud

Zix combined the security and compliance offering from its 2019 acquisition of AppRiver with its own in April to create a single platform that safeguards digital communication tools. The company said it spent $20 million to develop Secure Cloud, which vastly improves upon a loose integration rolled out in July 2019 to make Zix’s intellectual property available to AppRiver partners.

A lot of work has been done at the application level to Boost Secure Cloud’s advanced threat capabilities touching upon everything from sandboxing and messaging protection to integrations with SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) platforms. Up until now, Zix’s technology was mostly focused on protecting against phishing, malware and business email compromise (BEC) attacks.

Another new security feature with Secure Cloud is time of link click protection, meaning that a destination link in an email is scanned at the time the link is clicked to ensure there’s not malware on the site even if the email itself is from weeks or months earlier. Secure Cloud can also quarantine and remove a malicious attachment sent to multiple mailboxes in one fell swoop, according to the company.

Saitech Inc, is VMware Advanced Level Virtualization Solution Provider serving their esteemed SLED Clients nationwide.

Advanced Placement Test

The advanced placement test is a computer based examination that places the student in the proper level of French or Spanish. The test score will determine whether the student is placed in French or Spanish 121, 122, 223, or 224 (elementary or intermediate language classes) or in a 300/400 level class (advanced language classes) independently of prerequisites.

A student is not granted credit for merely taking the examination. Also a student, after speaking with the instructor, may choose to be placed in a lower level language course rather than the course indicated by the examination score. The department will always strive to place a student in the correct class by taking into consideration the student's Advanced Placement score, GPA and wishes.

To make an appointment, email the Department Chair

Dr. Luciano Picanco
Email: LC-Picanco@wiu.edu

Advanced Placement Credit Request

• Students beginning college language study at the 300- or 400-level may qualify, upon application, for advanced placement credit (equivalent to 122, 223, 224) by completing two 300- or 400-level courses (in the same language) with grades of C or better.
• Students who begin at the 224-level may qualify, upon application, for advanced intermediate placement credit (equivalent to 122 and 223) by completing 224 and one 300-level class (in the same language) with a grade of C or better.
• Students who begin at the 223-level may qualify, upon application, for intermediate placement credit (equivalent to 122) by completing 223 with a grade of C or better.
• Please note that a grade of C- does not fulfill this requirement. Credit cannot be earned for courses numbered 121, 122, 223, or 224 which are more elementary than coursework already completed, unless the credit is earned through Advanced Placement. Students earning the Illinois State Seal of Biliteracy will receive credit for courses numbered 121, 122, 223, and 224 in the specified language.

To apply for advanced credit, please stop by Morgan Hall 332.