It would benefit the users to save money by performing regular virus scans on EPIC for free. Every file downloaded on EPIC would be automatically scanned. Further, the user would be given an option to manually scan the system or individual folders for any virus and any infections found would be healed completely.

Yet another notable feature of this browser-with-a-difference is it sidebar. It has a feature-rich sidebar, which allows you to access your favorite sites and networking site profiles like Twitter, Facebook, Orkut and many others with just a single click. Besides this, there are many other utility applications like a free word processor, a to-do tool, snippet app, timer and most importantly it allows you to access your files and folder from the browser itself.

It allows you to choose from more than 1500 themes to suite your taste.

Presently, EpicBrowser is targeted towards the Indian users, but if you feel like interested ten you can use it other parts of the world as well.

[Download EpicBrowser]

However, there are times, when even the most reliable service like Gmail goes down. It can potentially rock your boat. And imagine a situation, when you loose your Gmail account due to hacking or you forgetting your password or in some cases even Google forfeiting your account. What will you do? Do you have a backup plan ready? Can you survive in such a situation.

The solution lies in Gmail Backup.

Gmail backup is a freeware software, which allows you to take a back of your Gmail messages to your desktop and restore it as and when required. The email messages are backup up in the standard .eml format. You can backup all the messages within a specific date range or just download the newest ones (for future backups). The messages are named after their subject line, the sender and the date stamp, which makes it easier to search your backup folder for specific messages.

Gmail Backup provides a simple and straightforward interface and also supports command-line execution for automated backups. Requires IMAP access to be enabled in your Gmail account.

[Gmail Backup]

Whatever browser you choose, most of the them today allow you have private browsing session. What is claimed by private browsing by these browsers is that your privacy will be kept secret, while you browse the net.

But does these browsers actually fulfill the tall claims. Do they really provide the secrecy and privacy to you to the extent you actually understand them to provide you.

There has recently been a research on these issues in Stanford University, and the results claims that it actually is not like so. There are two basic parameters, which should be fulfilled by the browsers before making claims of private browsing.

1. First and foremost, sites visited while browsing in private mode should leave no trace on the user’s computer. A family member who examines the browser’s history should find no evidence of sites visited in private mode.
2. Second, users may want to hide their identity from web sites they visit by, for example, making it difficult for web sites to link the user’s activities in private mode to the user’s activities in public mode.

And they find that…

…there is a great deal of inconsistency in the type of privacy provided by the different browsers. Firefox and Chrome, for example, attempt to protect against a local attacker and take some steps to protect against a web attacker, while Safari only protects against a local attacker. Even within a single browser there are inconsistencies.
For example, in Firefox 3.6, cookies set in public mode are not available to the web site while the browser is in
private mode. However, passwords and SSL client certificates stored in public mode are available while in private
mode. Since web sites can use the password manager as a crude cookie mechanism, the password policy is inconsistent with the cookie policy.

Related: Firefox Private Browsing – Does It Really Secures Your Privacy

Read the compete report here.

Most of the browsers have the Auto-Complete feature, which allows users to fill the online forms data like Username, Passwords and even Credit Card Numbers automatically, once you visit the login page. But there are chances, specially when you are using an old version of your favorite browser, that this data can be stolen and used against you.

In a talk scheduled for next week’s Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of White Hat Security, plans to detail critical weaknesses that are enabled by default in the browsers. He has talked about a trick, where a javascript is used to fill the first character in the field, triggering the autocomplete feature of the browser to fill the entire data. Once the data is filled, it can be captured, stolen and sent to a distant server.

Apple’s Safari and a few earlier versions like IE6 and IE7 of Internet Explorer are found to be most vulnerable to this trick. This is yet another reason, why we recommend the use of a robust Password manager like Roboform.

Read an interesting story on the issue here.

But many times users are unaware about the availability of secured connection https on a particular website. Some of the websites automatically redirect you to the encrypted page, but some of the websites do not do it for you automatically.

In such cases you have to type https:// specifically to reach the encryption enabled pages. And if you forget to use https:// then you are taken to the usual non-encrypted page.

How to Enforce Encrypted Access to Websites using https://

If you are using Firefox as a browser, then there is a simple firefox addon, Https Everywhere, which does the job automatically. It checks whether the https://version of the page you have requested, is available or not. If it is available, and it is identical to the webpage requested by you, then it automatically redirects your browser to the encrypted version.

This useful firefox addon is still in its beta and is currently available for a limited number of websites as given below.

• Google Search
• Wikipedia
• Twitter
• Facebook
• The New York Times
• The Washington Post
• Paypal
• EFF
• Tor
• Ixquick

Compensating for the limited set of websites to be accessed, it allows you to write your own set of rules easily.

[Download Https Everywhere]

Computer Privacy Protection – The Growing Concern

Online Privacy Protection among computer users is gaining importance with each passing day. The growing privacy threats are forcing people to care more than ever before for protecting their privacy.

Google Analytics – The most used tool to collect private data

Today Google Analytics is the first choice of the webmaster all over the word to capture the user behavior on their websites. It collects important information about the path of visitor and tools used by his browser. It is essentially used for helping the webmaster to improve upon the user experience on his site and give vital information about it.

It is made possible through a javascript code, which is embedded in the source code of the page, usually in the footer. This javascript gets executed on each page load and sends vital information about the user through its browser.

Most of the computer privacy data collected by Google Analytics is harmless in character, but still many people might consider it offending and might want to restrict the website owners to collect this private data.

What is the solution.

Computer Privacy Protection through Google Analytics Opt Out Browser Addon

Google Analytics themselves have come out with a browser add-on, which you can download and install in your browser. Once installed, it prevents the Google Analytics javascript code to get executed and thus saves your vital private data to be sent to the webmaster of the website you are visiting.

Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on (BETA)

To provide website visitors with more choice about how their data is collected by Google Analytics, we have developed the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. The add-on communicates with the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js) to indicate that information about the website visit should not be sent to Google Analytics.

If you want to opt out, download and install the add-on for your current web browser. The Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on is available for Internet Explorer (versions 7 and 8), Google Chrome (4.x and higher), and Mozilla Firefox (3.5 and higher).

[Download Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on]

Recently, SecurityXploded, the developers of BHORemover, have released an upgraded and advanced version of this BHO remover with the changed name of SpyBHORemover. This advanced version comes with pathora of features such as enhanced user interface, Backup & restore feature, Online verification mechanism, HTML Report generation, Option to globally enable/disable BHO for current user etc.

SpyBHORemover helps in quick identification and elimination of such spy BHO’s present in the system. It not only performs heuristic based threat analysis but also provides online threat verification mechanism which makes it easy to differentiate between legitimate and malicious BHOs.

Newer version presents the ‘Backup & Restore’ feature which makes it easy to remove and re-install the BHO any number of times. Users no longer have to worry about accidental removal of BHO as all removed BHOs are automatically backed up which can then be restored from ‘Removed BHO List’. It also comes with a unique feature to completely enable/disable all installed BHOs at one shot.

SpyBHORemover is the standalone portable tool which does not require any installation. It works on wide range of platforms starting from Windows XP to latest operating system, Windows 7.

[Download SpyBHORemover]

Applying latest release version to your web browser is one of they keys to your PC Security. In an earlier post on this blog, we have found out which of the popular web browsers are quick to release updates and which are take longest to release browser updates.

But despite lots of pains taken by the browsers to release patches and updates, browser users procrastinate and delay their update decisions.

Mozilla recently released the latest Firefox Update in the form of version 3.6. At the time of the release of their latest Firefox, they gave the users to update their browsers and if they denied the update, then they were redirected to a survey page to ascertain the reason why they are not installing the latest Firefox Update.

The responses given are summarized in the adjacent table.

It shows that the most common reason given by the users is “No Time”. C’mon people, it hardly takes a minute or two to install the latest firefox update. How can you disregard the importance of using the latest release of your browser and keeping yourself safe from most of the online threats.

We at PC Security, would like to advice its users to not delay the use of the latest version of their browser of choice. Using the latest version of your browser is the single most important step towards a better online security.

[Source]

Most of the modern day browser are on the constant look out for the vulnerabilities and security holes present in their codes. As soon as they find any weakness, they try to develop a patch and push it for the download by the users so that they are safe from the online threats.

And the efficacy of the browser to protect its users from online threats and malware is dependent upon the speed with which, it detects the vulnerability, develop a patch and makes it available for download by the users.  It is one of the factors, on which one should decide which is the safest internet browser.

A recent study by Symantec shows that Safari is the weakest browser among the popular web browsers on this account. They have devised a metric called average window of exposure to measure it. It is the difference in days between the time when exploit code affecting a vulnerability is made public and the time when the affected vendor makes a patch publicly available for that vulnerability. During this time, the computer or system on which the affected application is deployed may be susceptible to attack.

The average window of exposure for Safari was 13 days, based on a sample set of 78 patched vulnerabilities, while it was considerably lower for the other web browsers. And the worst part is that this period of exposure has increased in past one year. See the figure.

[Complete Report - pdf, 4MB]

With Comodo Dragon, they have tried to combine their expertise in the field of Internet and PC Security with the hot field of web browser.

It claims to be a safer browser than all the modern day browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera etc.

The Dragon encompasses all of the best features of Chrome. It includes an important feature every user needs to use the Internet in total safety today. – Strong security and privacy.

Features of Comodo Dragon

Comodo Dragon claims to

1. Has privacy enhancements that surpass those in Chromium’s technology
2. Has Domain Validation technology that identifies and segregates superior SSL certificates from inferior ones
3. Stops cookies and other Web spies
4. Prevents all Browser download tracking to ensure your privacy

The website down’t detail much about exactly what features are added which support their claim of added security to Comodo Dragon. But Katharine Hadow, in her review of Comodo Dragon, gives a few security features, which adds to the security of a user using Comodo Dragon.

1. If Comodo Dragon encounters a Domain-only certificate, it warns the user that the website may not be reliable. Domain-only certificates are available to any webmaster at low cost and with no verification, providing no guarantee of authentication.
2. Comodo Dragon does not transmit information about a browsing session to a remote server. Such a transmission exposes information about where the user has been on the Internet.
3. Comodo Dragon eliminates a potential threat: that attackers could find vulnerabilities by looking for the software errors that the browser was compiling to report to a remote server. Comodo Dragon neither tracks nor reports errors
4. Comodo Dragon protects Internet users from inadvertently exposing information about themselves, enhancing online security.

They are useful features.

But, Why I Will Avoid Using Comodo Dragon

Despite these useful features and security enhancements, I would still believe that security update is a very important factor behind the security of a web browser. With a vast pool of resources and information available, browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox, are in a much better position to detect and counter a potential vulnerability as soon as it is exposed. Howsoever efficient Comodo is, they cannot match the huge resources and efforts, Google can put in to immediately detect and plug-in a security hole in its browser through security update.

That is the reason precisely, I had given a miss to ChromePlus in my ChromePlus Review, which also had shown inclusion of great features to Chrome.

What do you Think. Let us know in the comments.