You’ve got to get moving if you haven’t already filed your tax return because April 15 is nearly here. This year, it is important to file if you are eligible for an economic stimulus payment. If you don’t file then you don’t get paid. On March 29 the Internal Revenue Service teamed up with tax operations run by such organizations as AARP and the United Way to help the many folks who don’t typically file and held what the agency called “Super Saturday”, one way the IRS and its partners are working to ensure everyone eligible receives a stimulus payment. IRS spokesman Jim Dupree said “For millions of Americans, filing a tax return is not routine” he also said that “Their income is either too low or not taxable”.

Specifications, implementation, and maintenance problems can all cause disastrous problems when it comes to Web Application Security. Has your software evolved over years and years of development? You are not alone. Most software has features added with use and grows more complex as time goes on. In-house testers tend to gravitate toward their area of expertise and just like clusters of tests executed, bugs are found in a concentrated portion of your software.

With software security, especially of application exposed to a large audience via a Web browser, increased reliability comes from decreasing the correlations between tests. And not all bugs are born alike. Deque Web Application Security Reviews can help detect bugs that have the largest negative impact.

We can help you define your security objectives and standards, code reviews, security penetration testing, and a security deployment review. You may also want to explore how Deque Worldspace Security Practice can help identify code vulnerabilities for common attacks like cross site scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection.

Source: deque.com

by Matt Hines

EC-Council University’s security science program aimed at helping qualified IT professionals advance their skills and take on high-level industry jobs.

EC-Council University, a New Mexico-based distance learning company, has launched the program to help qualified workers advance their training and move to the next level of the security profession.

Founded in 2006, the school is a spin-off of the International Council of Electronic Commerce Consultants, an online trainer that claims to have certified more than 40,000 IT professionals already, including 12,000-plus security specialists.

With the growing need for highly skilled security experts among businesses, EC-Council founders say there’s a scarcity of people who have all the know-how necessary to make the leap to CTO-level work.

“Traditionally, a lot of white hat hackers have been people with computer science backgrounds who taught themselves about hacking, but we’re trying to change the surface of the industry because we can’t leave this field of study up to chance,” said Jay Bavisi, president of EC-Council.

Continue reading from: infoworld.com

Be cautious of the people who contact or attempt to contact you.

You may never know, today’s advanced technology can also be used as instruments of deception.

Never entertain unsolicited phone instant messages, email messages or any other type of communication from unknown individuals/parties asking for information especially private and undisclosed ones. Some may even request information about your company so unless you are certain about the person’s authority, never supply the information.
Some people would try to “fish” for financial information using the email, never respond to these especially email solicitations for this information. Beware of the links and documents attached with the message following links sent in email.

To be continued…

What is a phishing attack?

Phishing is done by people who desire to obtain information, be it personal or most oftentimes financial to be used for their own motives. People who perform phishing attacks usually make use of email or web sites. They may send emails from a reputable institution such as bank accounts asking for information. And when the recipient of the message responds with the requested information, they will be able to use it to access to the accounts.

This leads to several net crimes, they can invade your accounts to extract personal information, pretend that you are them or even steal money from your bank account.

Thousands of cases like these were reported in the past years. So it would be wise to be cautious in who we spill our private information.

To be continued…

Customer Support
AVG Technologies has provided AVG Anti-Virus 8 users with an e-mail technical support within. In their site Grisoft.com there is FAQs site which will be useful for users who are having trouble. There is also a downloadable 124-page users’ manual in PDF format. Like the previous versions AVG does not provide telephone technical support or a free online user’s forum for entertaining questions from troubled users..

Conclusion
Overall, AVG Anti-Virus 8.0 works great on the detection and removal of virus, malware and spyware. It also works well in blocking Web threats. Future updates are also available to strengthen it and improve its performance. But it would be better if it has more technical support options in the future.

New Feature: The Link Scanner

The AVG Anti-Virus 8.0 newest addition, the Linkscanner technology promises to give AVG a more versatile protection. Linkscanner, developed by Exploit Prevention Labs, is known to obstruct malicious content from Web sites from getting in your computer.
Adding this to the system, surfing online with AVG Anti Virus 8.0 seems to be more secure than before.

What AVG Anti-Virus 8.0 linkscanner feature lacks is additional information about the exploit, unlike the standalone Linkscanner Pro package, which provides detailed information about the exploit it finds as well as a rich log archive so that sites with malicious software can be easily identified.

Although not as powerful as the Linkscanner Pro, AVG’s Linkscanner works great for an additional feature.

To be continued…

Using SharePoint server 2007, you can update, share, and discuss data such as customer communications; employee authored content, interactions with service providers and experts engaged on projects; and news related to the company, that too all under one roof. Taxing to and fro of emails can be dodged. In SharePoint Site, staff and management will be able to glance through or make changes in the company content right at one place. Less storage space is also required. News stories meant for the company’s intranet folio which essentially needs to be analyzed by the concerned superiors before getting posted can be done swiftly concurrently at the central space.

Using another such solution from Microsoft, i.e., Dedicated Exchange Server, employees and employers can enhance their email communication. The main advantage using Hosted Microsoft Exchange is that it can be integrated with SharePoint site. It also allows for wireless synchronization, archival of emails, download of heavy attachments even on the phone, access to contact list, so on and so forth. Cheap Exchange hosting services are available in the market. Also, application hosting and free hosting templates for project management, content management, document management, etc. are easily available these days.

Whilst you make a social network by means of SharePoint, users, private spaces, etc. are by default being developed for each user you adjoin. These individual spaces are known as My Sites, which operates similar to other existing social network sites, however with additional features and abilities. The My Site feature in SharePoint allows to see and administer data, links, calendar, associations, and other private data.

Originally speaking, in SharePoint Server 2010, each My Site has an integrated blog. Additionally, users can generate new SharePoint sites and fasten them to an on hand Team Site. This provides a blog to the team that adjoins additional content and value along with their document repositories, calendars and lists. SharePoint also allows for blog archiving which can also be indexed. Thus, it makes the blog a storehouse for combined facts and data.

People Search is an imperative SharePoint Server 2007 feature for big or emergent organizations. It helps search and find exact people much easier. Several kinds of search features are available to use, for instance the By Expertise search feature. Also, search results can be differentiated by tabs such as job title or by social distance.

Microsoft SharePoint Services also has integrated wikis for information sharing and information and group collaboration on content. SharePoint Wiki features include approval workflows and permissions, document check-in, and version history. There is also an option to use hyper-V hosting with a dedicated SharePoint server. SharePoint price is also not too expensive.

Free hosting templates, hosted blackberry, and Exchange host are also available through SharePoint hosting providers.

Interface

The user interface of the AVG AntiVirus 8.0 is an improved version of the previous design. However it turned out to be somewhat complicated, the right windowpane seems too crowded with the large icons (there are nine icons). Under each icon is a note that indicates whether the feature is active or not. When an icon is clicked the application will either display additional information about that tool (if an icon tool is clicked) or run that specific scan.
On the other hand the left windowpane only has three selections.

The Overview , Computer Scanner, and Update Now Options.

Computer Scanner has only one option, Scan All.

Update Now is intended to search the grisoft.com for updates.

There is a toolbar on top of the windows which contains the advanced feature options.

To be Continued…