Information Protection and Authentication of Texas (IPAT) has filed a patent infringement suit against 22 companies—including Microsoft, Symantec, CA, F-Secure, McAfee, Kaspersky, Sophos, Novell, and PC Tools—for infringing on a pair of patents issued in the mid-1990s regarding applications security and integrity. The first patent cited, 5,311,591, involves a method for authorizing what resources on a computer a particular application program can use; the second patent, 5,412,717, involves using hashes—essentially, unique mathematical identifiers—to confirm that a program hasn’t been tampered with on disk or in memory.
Tag Archive: PC Tools
Symantec Buys PC Tools
Symantec has a great reputation in computer security, and now it’ll have a bigger impact in the consumer market, as well as the emerging market, with the acquisition of consumer PC security company PC Tools. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2008, but Symantec would not release financial details.
PC Tools will operate under its own name as part of Symantec’s consumer business unit.
Symantec group president of consumer products Janice Chaffin said:
"We are excited to welcome PC Tools into the Symantec consumer family and believe the combination of our two companies will provide additional value and choice for consumers worldwide to better enable and protect their digital life."
Russia Now Biggest Malware Producer
Statistics gathered by Ireland’s Threat Expert automated threat analysis system find that Russia has surpassed both China and the United States in production of viruses, malware, and other malicious software. According to Threat Expert, Russia now accounts for 27.89 percent of malware, while China accounts for 26.52 percent. The United States is in third place with just under 10 percent.
Threat Expert concludes that the demise of the infamous malware distribitor the Russian Business Network (RBN) had essentially no impact on malware production in Russia—although it is now more difficult or analysts like Threat Expert to track the origins of malware. RBN was shut down in November 2007 after a long history of generating malware, hosting malware sites, and allegedly hosting phishing and child pornography operations.
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