Kaspersky received an increase in complaints after it began blocking sites with Google ads yesterday.

After a dodgy signature was added to its databases the russian products began blocking some pages which display Google Adsense advertising, mistakingly claiming the pages contained the malicious program Trojan.JS.Redirector.ar.

Kaspersky admitted the mistake yesterday. "An incorrect signature was added to the company's antivirus databases on 25 January at 07:00 Moscow time (GMT+3). As a result, Kaspersky Lab products erroneously blocked some legitimate websites containing the link on script http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js, which is used in the contextual advertising system Google Adsense," said the antivirus company in a statement.

However, Kaspersky moved quickly to fix  the issue. "The problem was quickly resolved and by 19:00 Moscow time the company's products had stopped generating alerts for legitimate Internet pages," Kaspersky said.

This is not the first time that anti-malware companies' mistakes have impacted on Google - In 2006 Norton Internet Security also blocked AdSense-based sites - Poor Google!

Websense has launched a a new feature set for its spam protection service that protects Facebook users against malware.

Websense acquired Defensio last year, a service to stop blog comment spam.  The latest version features integration with Facebook. Users can stop malicious links to malware from being posted before they appear.

"The Defensio application helps companies protect their brand reputation and their 'fans' from spam or malicious content on their corporate Facebook pages," said Websense.

As we have previously reported, Facebook is a popular target for malicious attacks including Koobface worms that spread themselves by posting malicious links on Facebook users' walls and several legitimate Facebook applications have been hacked.

It has been found that several Facebook applications can be hacked by compromising software on the users' own PCs.

A new wave of malicious dialers is hitting users of mobile phones according to experts at CA Security.

The trojans use the Java 2 Micro Edition programming language and make infected handsets send SMS messages to very high-cost phone numbers, causing great expense to the victim.

"As soon as the application is loaded, this malicious software starts to send premium text messages," CA warned on Tuesday. "The messages sent out are in the typical format to invoke premium services and land the mobile user with heavy mobile bills without the user's knowledge and consent."

Malware that automatically dials expensive telephone numbers were very rife ten years ago when dial-up internet services required a modem to connect to a phone line. With the growth of broadband connections the frequency of dialers disappeared.

The dramatic increase of smart phone use that can run software created by anyone has given malicious dialers a new opportunity. Similar to their counterparts ten years ago, the dialers of today usually dial expensive porn services. Further information can be found on the CA Blog.

Mobile antivirus software will soon be required on all phones to help protect against malicious threats.

Facebook has chosen McAfee to help protect its users. Facebook and McAfee have created a custom scanning repair toolset that will target Facebook's 350 milllion users.

As reported previously in our blog, Facebook needs all the anti-malware help it can get - Koobface has been spreading widely using Facebook and its now time for action!

Facebook will use a custom security tool developed by McAfee to clean users' computers when their accounts become infected.

Whilst an innovative concept, we believe there are better choices already available to combat the growing trend in Social Media Malware.

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010 has received a top award from the Austrian IT test lab AV-Comparatives.

In December, AV-Comparatives researchers performed a comparative test on 16 popular anti-virus software applications, measuring the impact of the software on system resources and performance.

The tests were conducted to demonstrate to what extent various anti-virus software programs slow the performance of common computer tasks.

AV-Comparatives says that the Kaspersky Lab software scored higher than anti-virus solutions from Avast, AVG, BitDefender, Eset, G Data, McAfee, Microsoft and Symantec.

The full version of the report `Performance Test. Impact of Antivirus Software on System Performance' can be found on the AV-Comparatives's website.

The latest malware reports for December 2009 are starting to appear but they all seem to be different! Several vendors have posted their lists of the most frequent malware strains for December '09 but they appear not to add up. This no doubt will leave users confused by the results.

Kaspersky documented three types of the Kido worm, better known as Conficker, in the top three positions of its December malware report. Sunbelt listed Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT in its top position within its  report, with nearly a quarter of December's activity. A brief look at the other entries within each report provides few if any matches.

"Comparing the monthly statistics from different anti-virus companies is truly comparing apples and oranges," said Tom Kelchner, Sunbelt Research Center manager. "What one company detects and identifies as a specific, named piece of malcode, another may detect generically."

He noted that antivirus companies have tried to work together and use common names but the complex process of analysis, combined with the speed required has made it near impossible to do so.

For the full story go to the Infosecurity mag article Malware Threat Reports Fail to Add Up

A classic date bug has hit Symantec's Endpoint Protection Manager and made it fail at the end of 2009 due to accepting no definition updates.

Symantec released a statement, saying "An issue has been identified in the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager (SEPM) server whereby all types of SEP definition content [AV/AS, IPS] with a date greater than December 31, 2009 11:59pm are considered to be 'out of date'."

Until a fix for the problem is found, Symantec will bodge the product: "Symantec Response will continue to publish Symantec Endpoint Protection antivirus and other definitions with the date 12/31/2009, and will only increase the revision number of the definition. More specifically the last certified definitions that was published on December 31, 2009 was “12/31/2009 rev. 041” version. The next certified definitions to be published will have a revision number greater than 041."

Symantec has reiterated that there is nothing customers need to do to make the bodge work.

Further information can be found on the Symantec website.