Two Special Offers on Intego Software

For a limited time only, get huge discounts on two Intego programs. MacZot has Intego FileGuard on sale for 40% off; that’s only $29.99, instead of $49.95. And for one day only, MacUpdate is featuring Intego NetBarrier at the bargain price of $34.99, or 50% off the regular price. Hurry, because these offers will disappear very soon!

Intego Partnership with Trend Micro Takes Form

Intego recently concluded a partnership with Trend Micro, whereby Trend Micro representatives worldwide will offer its customers Intego’s software solutions for endpoint and network security, and centralized management solutions, for Mac OS X users. This partnership is now up and running, with Trend Micro providing information about Intego’s software, and especially a comprehensive white paper about how to protect Macs in an enterprise environment. Intego is looking forward to working with Trend Micro in these markets, and is confident that this partnership will be fruitful.

How Much Does Phishing Cost?

Phishing, or methods of obtaining people’s personal information such as passwords and credit cards in order to fleece them, is big business. This type of scam, which usually works by sending e-mails with supposed links to real web sites (often Ebay, Amazon, banks or other merchants), claims millions of incredulous victims each year. An article in the New York Times suggests that more than 3.5 million Americans lost money to phishing scams in the year ending August, 2007. This represents more than $3 billion dollars!

There are many phishing methods, but the most common are e-mails leading users to bogus web sits that look real. (Of course, it’s simple to copy most of a web page and direct it to a different server.) Users generally enter credit card numbers, thinking that they are doing so on their bank’s web site, for example, and only find out, when they get their next bill, that they’ve been duped.

The best protection against phishing is intelligence: neither your bank, nor any online merchant, will send you an e-mail asking you to log into your account and give your credit card number. If you have doubts about e-mails, check the URLs that appear in your browser - because these e-mails often hide malicious URLs behind seemingly valid links.

Intego Personal Antispam offers protection from phishing, by spotting URLs that don’t match the visible links, and shunting these messages into a spam folder. This helps you keep phishing e-mails from ending up in your inbox. But be careful, also, of web sites that may lead you astray. Some sites seem to link to valid online retailers or banks, but actually lead to bogus sites. Again, check the URLs carefully before entering any confidential information.

Quicken Update Causes Data Loss

Users of the popular Quicken financial software have been dismayed to see that, after applying a recent update, some of their personal files disappeared. For some reason, the updater deleted their entire Desktop folder. This can be a disaster, as the Desktop is, for many people, a repository for in-progress files.

The first thing to do is not update Quicken, if you haven’t already done so, to ensure that you don’t get stung by this bug. If you have already updated the program, and lost files, do not reboot it until you contact Quicken’s technical support. (Though if you know you’ve lost files, or if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already rebooted.) Quicken says it will try and help users recover their files, but it seem that this could be difficult. (See their tech note on this issue.)

In the meantime, we can only suggest that, before running any software updates, you make sure to back up, if not your entire Mac, at least your home folder, using Intego Personal Backup. In case of problems, you can recover your files, and not have to wait to reboot your Mac. Regular backups are the most essential link in the Mac security chain, because having backups ensures that even if you get stung, your files will be safe.

Apple Doles Out More Security Fixes

It’s time for the 9th security update of the year from Apple, maybe this year’s last? Security Update 2007-009 comes chock full of fixes for Mac OS X: Leopard and Tiger. This one has literally dozens of fixes: from “A man-in-the-middle attack could cause Software Update to execute arbitrary commands” to “Previewing a file with QuickLook enabled may lead to the disclosure of sensitive information,” this update is a biggie. It fixes Mail, iChat, Software Update, Address Book, CUPS, and more. Download your version from the Software Update preference pane in System Preferences.

Note that this update fixes the Leopard quarantine bug that we reported here nearly a month ago.

Java Update for Tiger Patches a Slew of Security Holes

Apple has just released Java Release 6 for Mac OS X 10.4, which, in addition to updating Java software, provides dozens of security fixes for Java 1.4 and J2SE 5.0. It’s actually amazing to see how many updates this fixes; there are a total of thirty security fixes in this release. This update is for Tiger users only; one has to wonder if a Java security update is due for Leopard as well, or if these holes have already been patched in Mac OS X 10.5. If they have, why did it take so long for Apple to fix them for Tiger?