As most of my residential clients know, if you bring your computer in for virus removal it leaves my shop with avast Anti Virus Home on it. Avast provides a level of protection that no other free anti virus can provide. It not only keeps you secure in real time, and can scan your computer when the screen saver is running or when invoked manually, but it also has the ability to scan for viruses before Windows ever boots. This is one of the main reasons I started installing avast on residential client computers back in 2007. Well with a small bit of help from Clear Choice Computer, and a lot of other people avast Anti Virus has reached 100,000,000 users. To celebrate their acheivement they are offering 25% off of the avast Professional version, so everyone with a commercial computers can join in the celebration too. People quit waisting your money renewing your Norton, and McAfee antivirus., they aren’t that effective, and take a seriouse toll on system performance and reliability, give avast a try or better yet give me a call and i”ll come to you and install it for you 
If you would like to find out more check out the story at avast.com
Adobe on Tuesday patched seven vulnerabilities in Flash Player, six of them for critical bugs that hackers could use to hijack Windows, Mac or Linux machines.
The company also announced it will stop issuing Flash security updates for some Mac users next year.
In a security advisory published Tuesday, Adobe briefly spelled out the vulnerabilities, using the phrase “could potentially lead to code execution” in six of the descriptions. Like Apple, and unlike Microsoft, Adobe does not assign bugs a severity or threat rating. Vulnerabilities that can be used to introduce malicious code, however, are considered the most serious — and get the highest rating from vendors such as Microsoft.
Yesterday’s update was the first for Flash Player since late July. Although Adobe committed earlier this year to releasing security fixes every three months for its Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat software, Flash Player remains on an ad hoc schedule.
Even so, Adobe piggybacked the Flash Player security patches with the six updates that Microsoft released the same day for Windows, Internet Explorer (IE) and Office.
The update to Flash Player 10.0.42.34 fixed data injection and integer overflow vulnerabilities, patched a pair of memory corruption bugs, plugged a hole in JPEG image parsing and resolved “multiple crash vulnerabilities,” the company’s advisory said.
More from the Source
During the past two years we’ve written many times about programs which pretend to be something that they are not. The most notorious are rogue antivirus solutions – programs which display messages saying the victim machine is infected, even though it is not. These programs neither scan nor clean computers, and they are actually designed to persuade users that their computers are at risk and scare them into buying the “antivirus” product. Such programs are often referred to as “scareware”: Kaspersky Lab classifies them as FraudTool, a subset of the RiskWare class.
FraudTool.Win32.SpywareProtect2009: the main window
Such programs are extremely widespread and are increasingly used by cybercriminals. Whereas Kaspersky Lab detected about 3,000 rogue antivirus programs in the first half of 2008, more than 20,000 samples were identified in the first half of 2009.
Common distribution techniques
First of all, how do rogue antivirus programs end up on victim machines? They are spread using the same methods use to distribute other malware: for instance, a Trojan-Downloader can secretly download such programs, or vulnerabilities in compromised/ infected sites can be exploited to perform a drive-by download.
More often than not, though, such programs are downloaded by users themselves – cybercriminals use dedicated (Hoax) programs or adverts to trick users into doing this.
Hoax programs are another type of fraudware; they are designed to persuade users that they need to download a “wonder-working” antivirus solution, and will install the rogue solution on the victim machine even if the user declines the offer.
Hoax programs get downloaded to victim machines either by using a backdoor or by exploiting a vulnerability on a website. Once such a program is installed, an alert appears which says the system contains multiple errors, the registry is damaged or that confidential data is being stolen.
(more from the source)
Microsoft sold over three times more copies of Windows 7 in the week surrounding the Oct. 22 launch than it did Vista during its opening days in 2007. For the week of Oct. 18-24, and including the large numbers of pre-orders that Microsoft and online retailers took starting last June, Windows 7 unit sales were 234% higher than Vista’s in its first days in January 2007, said Stephen Baker, an analyst with the NPD Group.
On Tuesday, Microsoft will release the largest number of patches to fix flaws in Internet Explorer, Office, SQL Server, and every version of Windows including Windows 7.
13 updates will be released next and eight of them are “critical”. “Thirteen is not a lucky number,” said the director of security operations at nCircle Network Security. “They’ve been a busy bunch at Microsoft, that’s for sure.”
“The SQL Server update will affect a lot of people, especially those who use it as the back-end for their Web sites. And the Visual Studio update makes me wonder if it’s another fix for ATL,” he added.
Source: PCWorld
