Bitdefender Blog

On the one hand, that's sad. On the other hand, what a great way for both parents and children to learn about the idiocy that is IoT in the Clown. And oh boy do people need to learn! It could be worse. Imagine that the children had to hand over private information to use the toy, and for that entire dataset to be leaked because the toymaker knows nothing about security. Oh, that already happened: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-gb/blog/hotforsecurity/vtech-toymaker-h… Or imagine the toy had cameras and microphones uploading continuously to the Clown, then "hackers" released all of it.

^ this It's a fantastic system, especially when I compare how it used to work when I lived in the UK with how it works in Sweden: it feels like the UK is 50 years in the past. It should be government owned, definitely, but Sweden has a very poor history of securing it's IT systems in government. Like.. very poor. So, maybe I'm not 100% on-board. There needs to be oversight for sure. https://www.holmsecurity.com/resources/the-1177-leak https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/sweden-leaks-top-secre…

As mentioned in the article more technical details can be found in the linked article: https://www.bitdefender.com/business/swapgs-attack.html Worth pointing out that Xen is not vulnerable to the swapgs attack due to a lucky design decision from a decade ago: https://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2019-08/msg00507.…

This is apparently called "Scan SSL" by BitDefender. Their recommendation, once you find out about it, is to turn it off. http://www.bitdefender.com/support/what-to-do-when-security-certificat… This (mis/)feature has been disclosed at least since 2013 http://web.archive.org/web/20130115023957/http://www.bitdefender.com/s…

> Of porn viewing done by minors 22% are done by children under 10 (3) > 3: https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/bjsn.2017.12.7.326 I found this fairly dubious, and followed through with this and got to the study[0]. It uses [1] as its source. That source is a private antivirus company (bitdefender), and they don't quote any sources for those claims, but luckily they offer a solution: > Use security solutions with Parental Control to watch over kids online. Features such as Bitdefender Parental Control block inappropriate content, restrict Web access between certain hours and helps parents remotely monitor their children”s online activity I haven't followed through on the other statistics you quoted, but that seems like some major corporate BS you're basing your argument on there. > The research was conducted by Bitdefender in September 2016 covering 706 users of Bitdefender's security solutions. Oh okay, that about settles it. [0] https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.12968/bjsn.2017.12.7.326 [1] https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/one-in-10-visitors-of-…

From a performance impact standpoint, based on just one test suite, it is the worst on the market. https://www.av-comparatives.org/tests/performance-test-october-2019/ (and I linked to the same article in your parents comment...) Avira and Bitdefender manage to rank in the top tier of performance impact and protection every time I check. Both offer free products, and Bitdefender Free is considerably less annoying, in my past experiences. Free antivirus is actually one of the places where market competition forced a bunch of them to clean up their acts and offer a good non invasive product. Avira still has ads, but if you wanted one product on your pc and one on a home server, it might make sense to use two vendors products. https://www.bitdefender.com/solutions/free.html https://www.avira.com/en/free-antivirus-windows For one off system scans, besides the two mentioned above; ESET, F-Secure, Kaspersky, Panda (and Emsisoft which has Avira and Bitdefender built in) all offer great spot check products. ADWCleaner is indispensable. It's interesting that "anti-virus" has now become the free component in suites. You pay for things like VPN, password management, and home network security. Kaspersky goes a step further and offers VPN and password management in a free tier. https://usa.kaspersky.com/free-antivirus

At the most basic level - LLMs are stateless machines. They have no shared world view other than the weights encoded in the model (the knowledge “cut off”) Anything else must be fed as context- therefore, if you feed an LLM a fresh query with no context, there is no danger that it would have access to context from another session. Basic web application session management applies here. Doesn’t mean that trillion dollar valued companies can’t mess it up tho. https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/chatgpt-bug-leak…

It has. For example, PirateFi back in 2025: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/piratefi-game-re… The FBI were seeking victims for ~8 "games" earlier this year: https://forms.fbi.gov/victims/Steam_Malware/view

Happened to Linux Mint, famously: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/tampered-linux-m…

I mean, yea. Here is a device driver bug that was around 11 years. https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/google-reveals-w…

A kid in Hungary was arrested for exactly this (and it was a cheap bus ticket): https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/budapest-police-…

> Because Chrome OS is offered on low-cost laptops that are unsuitable for office work. ChromeOS Flex exists, it is free of charge, and it runs on more or less any x86-64 computer, including Intel Macs. Nordic Choice got hit with ransomeware and rather than paying, just reformatted most of its client PCs with ChromeOS Flex and kept going with cloud services. https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/nordic-choice-ho…

I looked up the ransomware attack out of curiosity: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/asustor-nas-owne… It looks like Deadbolt also hit QNAP and Terramaster.

This is a drastic response, but they didn't make up the security threat. Attackers convincing users to side-load malware is a thing. https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/hackers-steal-mi…

I wouldn't: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/researchers-crac… I don't trust HP firmware to wake the laptop from sleep in one attempt, let alone trust them to securely store their telemetry (that they won't let me see directly).

Employers in the U.S. are expecting to see domestic IP addresses. A laptop farm hosts the corporate laptop (domestically) that is sent to the remote worker. Hardware is provided to work the power remotely, along with all other functions. https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/us-woman-years-f… https://sashaingber.substack.com/p/the-23-year-old-who-infiltrated-a https://cyberscoop.com/doj-indicts-five-in-north-korean-fake-it-worker… https://therecord.media/arizona-woman-pleads-guilty-north-korean-lapto…

ISPs / other middlemen can monitor and modify unencrypted traffic. In Egypt, Syria and Turkey for example ISP’s injected malware into unencrypted sites that led people to install spyware when attempting to download legitimate programs (link). Other state actors have changed the content of news media, etc. Without HTTPS you lose the ability to trust the integrity of a given webpage. https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/turkish-egyptian…

Seems to only affect some users. Also, not claiming it was on purpose or with malicious intent. I’m sure it is an unintentional bug. But, it also goes to show that Apple can tweak your settings at will, ignoring your prior preferences, which I think we can all agree should not happen. It is also not the first time this happens: - iOS 18.3 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/01/ios-18-3-macos-15-3-updates-sw… - iOS 17 https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/ios-17-update-se…

I believe Ledger already leaked customers' addresses. https://www.bitdefender.com/en-au/blog/hotforsecurity/hacker-publishes… Probably the most dangerous and costly data leak ever. Can't believe Ledger was able to stay in business after that.

> Under his leadership, the company has sold more than seven million hardware wallets worldwide, maintaining a perfect security record with no successful breaches of their devices. yeah uhhhhhh, what about all of their newsletter subs and device sales shipping data though? I wonder if he got one of the threatening ransom letters in the mail and didn't pay because they said it was a scam? https://www.bitdefender.com/en-au/blog/hotforsecurity/hacker-publishes… https://old.reddit.com/r/ledgerwalletleak/

Glad I never opted in to that Ledger Recover service… For people that don’t know the story. https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/ledgers-recover-…

Onavo isn’t paid, it’s just a “free” VPN app. There’s no paid participation, you just download it. https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/facebook-pulls-its-vpn… https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-to-remove-data-security-app-from… Edit: Typo.

And many people have learned to bypass these filters by renaming extensions. You can always zip things up or just rename foo.py to foo.py.pdf But I understand that there is still reason to filter filetypes. Apparently some programs will run programs if they see certain filetypes... Here's a recent telegram exploit where the user did have to click on the file https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/telegram-patches-zero-…

I hate everything about the provided title; this is "ON WINDOWS", is not a "Google Workspace weakness", is most certainly not "plaintext" for any definition of that word, is a 3rd-party blogspam from <https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/businessinsights/the-chain-reaction-n… or arguably even <https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1420209> and was closed "wontfix" because it requires local machine takeover

> Damages are well regulated so you can't sue for €1 million just because someone's bicycle ran over your toe. Counter-example: a website uses Google Fonts and the owner gets a letter from someone's German lawyer demanding they pay "damages" for the GDPR "violation" [0] https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/german-website-fined-1… [1] https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/razzia-wegen-betrugs-rund-um-googl…

For a while they used crypto miners on their site. Not sure if it’s still in effect, but it caused me to look elsewhere. https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/the-pirate-bay-used-si…

https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/german-website-fined-1… https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-google-fonts-abmahnung-d…

Only a matter of time, but that time is now already. https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/us-police-parking-mete…

The white paper is really short and pretty damming: https://www.bitdefender.com/files/News/CaseStudies/study/413/Bitdefend…