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Testimonials
Amazing!
Zack is amazing! I have gone to him with computer issues for the past few years now and he always finds a way to fix… Read more “Amazing!”
Professional, smart & sensitive
Cannot say enough good things about Zack Rahhal and his team. Professional, smart, sensitive to small biz budgets and a helluva good guy. Could not… Read more “Professional, smart & sensitive”
AMAZINGLY WONDERFUL STAFF
stars indeed. So reliable and helpful and kind and smart. We call Al and he is “on it” immediately and such a FABULOUS teacher, patient… Read more “AMAZINGLY WONDERFUL STAFF”
Whatever my need, unfailingly helpful
I’ve been a customer of the staff at Advantage for many years now. They have never let me down! Whatever my need, however big or… Read more “Whatever my need, unfailingly helpful”
Best Kept Secret
I’ve known the Advantage Team for years. They are the absolute best techs in the field, bar none. I couldn’t tell you how many tens… Read more “Best Kept Secret”
Excellent Experience
I had an excellent experience with Advantage. Aside from being extremely professional and pleasant generally, Zack was incredibly responsive and helpful, even before and after… Read more “Excellent Experience”
Simply The Best!
Simply The Best! Our company has been working with Advantage Computer Solutions for a few years, Zack and his Team are AWESOME! They are super… Read more “Simply The Best!”
Awesome
The engineering team at Advantage Computers is the best in the business. They are nothing short of technical… Read more “Awesome”
It’s like having a cousin in the business.
Al, Nasser and Zack have been keeping our operations going for over a decade, taking care of our regular upgrades and our emergency system problems.… Read more “It’s like having a cousin in the business.”
Exceptional People
In many cases, exceptional people do not receive recognition for their hard work and superior customer service. We do not want this to be one of those… Read more “Exceptional People”
Highly Recommended
I became a customer about 6-7 months and I can say nothing but great things about this business. Zack takes care of me. I am… Read more “Highly Recommended”
Life Savers
THANK GOD for this local computer repair business who saved me hundreds, my hard drive was messed up, i called the company with warranty they… Read more “Life Savers”
I don’t have enough words to express my appreciation
I don’t have enough words to express my appreciation for Nassar and Paul, and the other members of Advantage Computer Solutions. I live in Bergen… Read more “I don’t have enough words to express my appreciation”
Minuteman Press Newark
Advantage Computer Solutions is absolutely great. They show up, do what they say they are going to, complete the job without issues (my other computer… Read more “Minuteman Press Newark”
Knowledgeable, Reliable, Reasonable
Knowledgeable, Reliable, Reasonable Working with Advantage Computers since 1997 for both personal and business tech support has been a rewarding and enjoyable experience. Rewarding, in… Read more “Knowledgeable, Reliable, Reasonable”
Excellent service!
Excellent service! I am the administrator for a busy medical office which relies heavily on our computer system. We have used Advantage Computer Solutions for… Read more “Excellent service!”
Great Advice and Service
Advantage offers great advice and service I bought parts for my gaming pc online and they put it together in a day for a great… Read more “Great Advice and Service”
Great Service, Support and Sales
Our company has been using the services of Advantage Computers since 2006. It was important to find a reliable company to provide us with the technical… Read more “Great Service, Support and Sales”
Extremely Professional and Passionate
Our company has been working with Advantage since the 1990’s and have been a loyal client ever since. Advantage does not make it very difficult… Read more “Extremely Professional and Passionate”
Handles all our Office IT
Advantage Computer Solutions has handled all of our computer and IT needs for the past 2 years. The staff is always professional and the service… Read more “Handles all our Office IT”
Passaic Housing Authority
Since 1996 the Housing Authority of the City of Passaic has been a client of Advantage Computer Solutions. Our Agency has utilized their outstanding services… Read more “Passaic Housing Authority”
They made sure EVERYTHING was working
“When the computer I use to run my photography business started acting erratically and kept shutting down, I was in a panic. I depend on… Read more “They made sure EVERYTHING was working”
The slow Tick‑ing time bomb: Tick APT group compromise of a DLP software developer in East Asia
ESET Research uncovered a campaign by APT group Tick against a data-loss prevention company in East Asia and found a previously unreported tool used by the group
The post The slow Tick‑ing time bomb: Tick APT group compromise of a DLP software developer in East Asia appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
5 signs you’ve fallen for a scam – and what to do next
Here’s how to know you have fallen victim to a scam – and what to do in order to undo or mitigate the damage.
The post 5 signs you’ve fallen for a scam – and what to do next appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
APT hackers set a honeytrap to ensnare victims – Week in security with Tony Anscombe
A request to move an online conversation to a supposedly more secure platform may not be as well-meaning as it sounds
The post APT hackers set a honeytrap to ensnare victims – Week in security with Tony Anscombe appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Common WhatsApp scams and how to avoid them
Here’s a roundup of some of the most common tricks that fraudsters use to dupe their victims on WhatsApp – and what you can do to protect yourself against them.
The post Common WhatsApp scams and how to avoid them appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
OSV and the Vulnerability Life Cycle
Posted by Oliver Chang and Andrew Pollock, Google Open Source Security Team
It is an interesting time for everyone concerned with open source vulnerabilities. The U.S. Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity requirements for vulnerability disclosure programs and assurances for software used by the US government will go into effect later this year. Finding and fixing security vulnerabilities has never been more important, yet with increasing interest in the area, the vulnerability management space has become fragmented—there are a lot of new tools and competing standards.
In 2021, we announced the launch of OSV, a database of open source vulnerabilities built partially from vulnerabilities found through Google’s OSS-Fuzz program. OSV has grown since then and now includes a widely adopted OpenSSF schema and a vulnerability scanner. In this blog post, we’ll cover how these tools help maintainers track vulnerabilities from discovery to remediation, and how to use OSV together with other SBOM and VEX standards.
Vulnerability Databases
The lifecycle of a known vulnerability begins when it is discovered. To reach developers, the vulnerability needs to be added to a database. CVEs are the industry standard for describing vulnerabilities across all software, but there was a lack of an open source centric database. As a result, several independent vulnerability databases exist across different ecosystems.
To address this, we announced the OSV Schema to unify open source vulnerability databases. The schema is machine readable, and is designed so dependencies can be easily matched to vulnerabilities using automation. The OSV Schema remains the only widely adopted schema that treats open source as a first class citizen. Since becoming a part of OpenSSF, the OSV Schema has seen adoption from services like GitHub, ecosystems such as Rust and Python, and Linux distributions such as Rocky Linux.
Thanks to such wide community adoption of the OSV Schema, OSV.dev is able to provide a distributed vulnerability database and service that pulls from language specific authoritative sources. In total, the OSV.dev database now includes 43,302 vulnerabilities from 16 ecosystems as of March 2023. Users can check OSV for a comprehensive view of all known vulnerabilities in open source.
Every vulnerability in OSV.dev contains package manager versions and git commit hashes, so open source users can easily determine if their packages are impacted because of the familiar style of versioning. Maintainers are also familiar with OSV’s community driven and distributed collaboration on the development of OSV’s database, tools, and schema.
Matching
The next step in managing vulnerabilities is to determine project dependencies and their associated vulnerabilities. Last December we released OSV-Scanner, a free, open source tool which scans software projects’ lockfiles, SBOMs, or git repositories to identify vulnerabilities found in the OSV.dev database. When a project is scanned, the user gets a list of all known vulnerabilities in the project.
In the two months since launch, OSV-Scanner has seen positive reception from the community, including over 4,600 stars and 130 PRs from 29 contributors. Thank you to the community, which has been incredibly helpful in identifying bugs, supporting new lockfile formats, and helping us prioritize new features for the tool.
Remediation
Once a vulnerability has been identified, it needs to be remediated. Removing a vulnerability through upgrading the package is often not as simple as it seems. Sometimes an upgrade will break your project or cause another dependency to not function correctly. These complex dependency graph constraints can be difficult to resolve. We’re currently working on building features in OSV-Scanner to improve this process by suggesting minimal upgrade paths.
Sometimes, it isn’t even necessary to upgrade a package. A vulnerable component may be present in a project, but that doesn’t mean it is exploitable–and VEX statements provide this information to help in prioritization of vulnerability remediation. For example, it may not be necessary to update a vulnerable component if it is never called. In cases like this, a VEX (Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange) statement can provide this justification.
Manually generating VEX statements is time intensive and complex, requiring deep expertise in the project’s codebase and libraries included in its dependency tree. These costs are barriers to VEX adoption at scale, so we’re working on the ability to auto-generate high quality VEX statements based on static analysis and manual ignore files. The format for this will likely be one or more of the current emerging VEX standards.
Compatibility
Not only are there multiple emerging VEX standards (such as OpenVEX, CycloneDX, and CSAF), there are also multiple advisory formats (CVE, CSAF) and SBOM formats (CycloneDX, SPDX). Compatibility is a concern for project maintainers and open source users throughout the process of identifying and fixing project vulnerabilities. A developer may be obligated to use another standard and wonder if OSV can be used alongside it.
Fortunately, the answer is generally yes! OSV provides a focused, first-class experience for describing open source vulnerabilities, while providing an easy bridge to other standards.
CVE 5.0
The OSV team has directly worked with the CVE Quality Working Group on a key new feature of the latest CVE 5.0 standard: a new versioning schema that closely resembles OSV’s own versioning schema. This will enable easy conversion from OSV to CVE 5.0, and vice versa. It also enables OSV to contribute high quality metadata directly back to CVE, and drive better machine readability and data quality across the open source ecosystem.
Other emerging standards
Not all standards will convert as effortlessly as CVE to OSV. Emerging standards like CSAF are comparatively complicated because they support broader use cases. These standards often need to encode affected proprietary software, and CSAF includes rich mechanisms to express complicated nested product trees that are unnecessary for open source. As a result, the spec is roughly six times the size of OSV and difficult to use directly for open source.
OSV Schema’s strong adoption shows that the open source community prefers a lightweight standard, tailored for open source. However, the OSV Schema maintains compatibility with CSAF for identification of packages through the Package URL and vers standards. CSAF records that use these mechanisms can be directly converted to OSV, and all OSV entries can be converted to CSAF.
SBOM and VEX standards
Similarly, all emerging SBOM and VEX standards maintain compatibility with OSV through the Package URL specification. OSV-Scanner today also already provides scanning support for the SPDX and CycloneDX SBOM standards.
OSV in 2023
OSV already provides straightforward compatibility with established standards such as CVE, SPDX, and CycloneDX. While it’s not clear yet which other emerging SBOM and VEX formats will become the standard, OSV has a clear path to supporting all of them. Open source developers and ecosystems will likely find OSV to be convenient for recording and consuming vulnerability information given OSV’s focused, minimal design.
OSV is not just built for open source, it is an open source project. We desire to build tools that will easily fit into your workflow and will help you identify and fix vulnerabilities in your projects. Your input, through contributions, questions, and feedback, is very valuable to us as we work towards that goal. Questions can be asked by opening an issue and all of our projects (OSV.dev, OSV-Scanner, OSV-Schema) welcome contributors.
Want to keep up with the latest OSV developments? We’ve just launched a project blog! Check out our first major post, all about how VEX could work at scale.
Thank you and goodbye to the Chrome Cleanup Tool
Posted by Jasika Bawa, Chrome Security Team
Starting in Chrome 111 we will begin to turn down the Chrome Cleanup Tool, an application distributed to Chrome users on Windows to help find and remove unwanted software (UwS).
Origin story
The Chrome Cleanup Tool was introduced in 2015 to help users recover from unexpected settings changes, and to detect and remove unwanted software. To date, it has performed more than 80 million cleanups, helping to pave the way for a cleaner, safer web.
A changing landscape
In recent years, several factors have led us to reevaluate the need for this application to keep Chrome users on Windows safe.
First, the user perspective – Chrome user complaints about UwS have continued to fall over the years, averaging out to around 3% of total complaints in the past year. Commensurate with this, we have observed a steady decline in UwS findings on users’ machines. For example, last month just 0.06% of Chrome Cleanup Tool scans run by users detected known UwS.
Next, several positive changes in the platform ecosystem have contributed to a more proactive safety stance than a reactive one. For example, Google Safe Browsing as well as antivirus software both block file-based UwS more effectively now, which was originally the goal of the Chrome Cleanup Tool. Where file-based UwS migrated over to extensions, our substantial investments in the Chrome Web Store review process have helped catch malicious extensions that violate the Chrome Web Store’s policies.
Finally, we’ve observed changing trends in the malware space with techniques such as Cookie Theft on the rise – as such, we’ve doubled down on defenses against such malware via a variety of improvements including hardened authentication workflows and advanced heuristics for blocking phishing and social engineering emails, malware landing pages, and downloads.
What to expect
Starting in Chrome 111, users will no longer be able to request a Chrome Cleanup Tool scan through Safety Check or leverage the “Reset settings and cleanup” option offered in chrome://settings on Windows. Chrome will also remove the component that periodically scans Windows machines and prompts users for cleanup should it find anything suspicious.
Even without the Chrome Cleanup Tool, users are automatically protected by Safe Browsing in Chrome. Users also have the option to turn on Enhanced protection by navigating to chrome://settings/security – this mode substantially increases protection from dangerous websites and downloads by sharing real-time data with Safe Browsing.
While we’ll miss the Chrome Cleanup Tool, we wanted to take this opportunity to acknowledge its role in combating UwS for the past 8 years. We’ll continue to monitor user feedback and trends in the malware ecosystem, and when adversaries adapt their techniques again – which they will – we’ll be at the ready.
As always, please feel free to send us feedback or find us on Twitter @googlechrome.
‘A woman from Mars’: Life in the pursuit of space exploration
An astrobiologist, analog astronaut, author and speaker, Dr. Michaela Musilova shares her experience as a woman at the forefront of space exploration and from her quest for scientific and personal excellence
The post ‘A woman from Mars’: Life in the pursuit of space exploration appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Love scam or espionage? Transparent Tribe lures Indian and Pakistani officials
ESET researchers analyze a cyberespionage campaign that distributes CapraRAT backdoors through trojanized and supposedly secure Android messaging apps – but also exfiltrates sensitive information
The post Love scam or espionage? Transparent Tribe lures Indian and Pakistani officials appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
What does $5,000 buy you on a hacking forum? – Week in security with Tony Anscombe
A bootkit that ESET researchers have discovered in the wild is the BlackLotus UEFI bootkit that is being peddled on hacking forums
The post What does $5,000 buy you on a hacking forum? – Week in security with Tony Anscombe appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Google Trust Services now offers TLS certificates for Google Domains customers
Andy Warner, Google Trust Services, and Carl Krauss, Product Manager, Google Domains
How do I use it?
Google Domains and ACME DNS-01