CompUSA
Showing posts with label gebraeel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gebraeel. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Sunbelt Software Announces Top 10 Malware Threats for March

(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sunbelt Software, a leading provider of Windows security software, today announced the top 10 most prevalent malware threats for the month of March 2010. The report, compiled from monthly scans performed by Sunbelt Software's award-winning anti-malware solution, VIPRE® Antivirus, and its antispyware tool, CounterSpy®, is a service of SunbeltLabs™.

“Generic and behavior-based detections help VIPRE nail a lot of the polymorphic variants and newly-created malicious code. It might be new and evade detections for existing malicious activity, but when it runs in VIPRE’s MX-V™ virtual environment, the malicious activity is sure to be caught.”

The list of detections for March shows the continued prevalence of Trojan horse programs circulating on the Internet and the growing trend of generic and behavior-based detections in antivirus detections. Generic and behavior-based detections by the antivirus industry have improved thanks to the massive increase in new malcode, which number thousands per day.

The top two detections for the month remained in the same positions as last month. Both Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT (31.07 percent) and Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen (4.97 percent) maintained approximately the same pervasiveness in the overall malware tracked. The top 10 made up more than 50 percent of all detections for the month and the top two made up greater than 36 percent of all detections.

Sunbelt’s Top 10 list is similar to February’s detections, however March saw the additions of INF.Autorun (v) and BehavesLike.Win32.Malware (v) appearing in the fifth and sixth spots and Trojan.Win32.Agent and Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen (v) dropped off the list.

Other detections with a significant change in March include Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen (v), which saw its percentage of total detections grow by almost 50 percent, and Trojan.Win32.Generic.pak!cobra – which saw a significant drop in its share from 3.37 percent to 1.37 percent of all detections.

“Good antivirus defense requires not only up-to-the-minute detections of malware, but fast detection as well,” said Sunbelt Software research center manager Tom Kelchner. “Generic and behavior-based detections help VIPRE nail a lot of the polymorphic variants and newly-created malicious code. It might be new and evade detections for existing malicious activity, but when it runs in VIPRE’s MX-V™ virtual environment, the malicious activity is sure to be caught.”

“It’s a cat-and-mouse game that’s been going on as long as there have been antivirus engines. The hackers try to come up with something that will evade detection and steal something valuable from its victims. Sunbelt creates detection technology that works fast and seamlessly to not bog down our customers’ systems,” Kelchner added.

New entries in the top 10 in March were:

* INF.Autorun (v) – Trojan downloader
* BehavesLike.Win32.Malware (v) – category of suspicious behaving malware

The top 10 results represent the number of times a particular malware infection was detected during VIPRE and CounterSpy scans that report back to ThreatNet, Sunbelt Software’s community of opt-in users. These threats are classified as moderate to severe based on method of installation among other criteria established by SunbeltLabs. The majority of these threats propagate through stealth installations or social engineering.

The top 10 most prevalent malware threats for the month of March are:
1. Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT 31.07%
2. Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen 4.97%
3. Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen (v) 3.76%
4. Trojan.Win32.Generic!SB.0 3.36%
5. INF.Autorun (v) 1.70%
6. BehavesLike.Win32.Malware (v) 1.47%
7. Trojan.Win32.Generic.pak!cobra 1.37%
8. Trojan.Win32.Malware 1.37%
9. Trojan.ASF.Wimad (v) 1.23%
10. Virtumonde 1.21%

To see a graphical comparison of the top 10 most prevalent malware infections between February and March, please visit http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/malware-threat-report/February-March-2010-Malware-Threat-Report.jpg.

-----
www.fayettefrontpage.com
Fayette Front Page
www.georgiafrontpage.com
Georgia Front Page
Follow us on Twitter:  @GAFrontPage

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

GT Models Predict the Remaining Life of Mechanical and Electronic Equipment

New research at the Georgia Institute of Technology could soon make predicting the degradation and remaining useful life of mechanical and electronic equipment easier and more accurate, while significantly improving maintenance operations and spare parts logistics.

Nagi Gebraeel, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, has developed models that use data from real-time sensor measurements to calculate and continuously revise the amount of remaining useful life of different engineering systems based on their current condition and health status. These predictions are then integrated with maintenance management and spare parts supply chain policies as part of an autonomous “sense and respond” logistics paradigm.

“Recent advances in sensor technology and wireless communication have enabled us to develop innovative methods for indirectly monitoring the health of different engineering systems,” said Gebraeel, who started working on this project at the University of Iowa. “This has created an environment with an abundance of data that can be exploited in decision-making processes across different application domains such as manufacturing, aging infrastructure, avionics systems, military equipment, power plants and many others.”

Gebraeel’s predictive models were detailed during two presentations on October 14 at the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Annual Meeting. Funding for model development was provided by the National Science Foundation.

Because Gebraeel’s sensor-driven prognostic models combine general reliability characteristics with real-time condition-based signals, they provide an accurate and comprehensive assessment of a system’s current health status and its future evolution. These accurate predictions are then used to determine the most economical time to order a spare part component and schedule a maintenance replacement by accounting for different costs, including those due to unexpected failures, spare part inventory holding and out-of-stock situations.

Gebraeel began his research by monitoring the vibration and acoustic emissions signals from rotating machinery, namely bearings. He extracted degradation-based characteristics pertaining to key components on the machinery and used them to develop condition-based signals. Gebraeel then created stochastic models to characterize the evolution of these condition-based signals and predict the remaining life of these critical components.

After extensive experimentation and testing, results showed that his techniques can potentially reduce the total failure costs and costs associated with running out of spare parts inventory by approximately 55 percent. With such positive results, Gebraeel turned his attention to developing models for electronics. He recently began working with Rockwell Collins to develop adaptive models to estimate the remaining useful life of aircraft electronic components.

“Aircraft take off at ambient ground temperatures and quickly reach their cruising altitudes, where the temperatures tend to be below zero,” explained Gebraeel. “It’s these changes in temperature coupled with inherent vibrations that affect the deterioration and lifetime of electronic equipment.”

Gebraeel’s goal is to embed his prognostic methodology into key avionic systems so that decisions can be made about whether an aircraft is capable of carrying out a specific mission or if it should be assigned to a shorter mission or grounded.

Gebraeel is also working closely with Virginia-based Global Strategic Solutions LLC, which has funding from two U.S. Navy Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants. The focus of one of the grants is to advance the development of embedded diagnostics and prognostics to predict the remaining life distributions of electrical power generation systems on board U.S. Naval aircraft. The focus of the second grant is to develop advanced health monitoring and remaining useful life models for aircraft communication, navigation and identification (CNI) avionics systems used on the Joint Strike Fighter.

“The long term impact of all of these projects on human safety and maintenance costs will be tremendous, especially in the airline industry,” noted Gebraeel.

-----
www.georgiafrontpage.com
Georgia Front Page
www.fayettefrontpage.com
Fayette Front Page