Avast Security News

As you have probably heard, 1.4 billion usernames, passwords, and emails were leaked on the darknet. This wasn’t a new breach, but rather a collection of previous leaks all put together in one place, forming one of the largest consolidated databases ever discovered.

Last week’s episode, like most Mr. Robot episodes, included a flashback and jumped back and forth in time.

The independent IT-security institute AV-TEST evaluated twenty-one home user security products through September and October 2017. Avast Free Antivirus passed with flying colors, successfully protecting against ALL of the 9,999 malicious files thrown at it.

On Sunday, December 3rd, we saw a peak in one of our detections, JS:Miner-I, which blocks a cryptocurrency miner that uses the cryptonight algorithm to mine Monero, a popular cryptocurrency. The algorithm is suitable for using PC CPU for mining, and the miner is run using JavaScript. We blocked JS:Miner-I from launching on our users’ PCs, preventing 34.7 million attacks in just one day. The extreme peak wasn’t the only thing that caught our attention; all the detections were launched within Google’s Chrome browser.

I recently conducted an informal survey among ten of my Mac-user friends. The results revealed a truth both unsurprising and frightening at the same time. I was asking how many had ever taken steps to secure their home networks. The answer, I learned, was a resounding NONE.