OPSWAT’s March 2012 Security Industry Market Share Analysis

Windows XP is dead-dead-dead. After all, Windows XP is a has-been in the world of operating systems – now 2+generations behind – and, eating dust. Or, so say all the pundits.

If you’re an XP user, as I am, then you can take some solace from OPSWAT’s latest quarterly report (released today), bolstered by more than 353,000 data points, which clearly shows Windows XP continues to hold substantial market share. In fact, according to OPSWAT’s data – Windows XP remains the most popular Windows operating system in both North America and worldwide, with slightly under half of computers using XP.

I’ll point out – I also run with Windows 7 and, Windows 8 Consumer Preview (a super system once one has crossed the “I have to learn some new stuff” barrier) – both of which are considerably safer overall than XP. So, I have no ax to grind – but, I do have an XP horse in the race. There’s little doubt of course, that XP will eventually disappear from the scene – but, not quite yet.

Windows 7, and rightfully so, continues to blaze ahead in the race to displace XP from its preeminent market position and, as shown in the following OPSWAT graphic, now commands better than 46% of the operating system market both in North America, and world wide. Windows Vista on the other hand, is barely on the horizon.

Graphic courtesy OPSWAT

Additionally, the OPSWAT report takes a close look at world wide and North American Antivirus vendors market share and, the gathered information in this latest report shows virtually no shift in market penetration from previous reports. In the world wide market place, the same Top 10 players, as expected, continue to hold substantial positions.

Graphic courtesy OPSWAT

In the North American marketplace, the same high penetration ratios exist although, the players shift position – with Symantec jumping into first position overall, from its sixth position worldwide.

Graphic courtesy OPSWAT

Microsoft, as shown in the following graphic, continues to gain ground with a fairly dramatic shift in growth.

As in previous OPSWAT reports, free security solutions remain at the top of the market with the highest numbers of installations. The top three products in North America, and worldwide, are available free for download.

OPSWAT’s analysis of the peer to peer application market share surprised me somewhat, since it showed LimeWire continuing to hold a market share -despite a court injunction prohibiting the use of the application, dated October 26, 2010.

On the other hand, there was no surprise in seeing µTorrent maintaining its lead over the competition in the public file sharing application market – as the following graphic indicates.

Graphic courtesy OPSWAT

The full report which is chock fill of absorbing statistics is available here.

So, who is OPSWAT?

If you’re a techie, then you’re very likely familiar with AppRemover, a free powerful anti-malware, antivirus application remover, and Metascan Online, a free online file scanner – both from OPSWAT. Beyond this direct connection however, you might not be familiar with OPSWAT.

From the site:

OPSWAT is the industry leader in software management SDKs, interoperability certification and multiple-engine scanning solutions. Our solutions are simplified and comprehensive, solving complex development problems to reduce time and costs for your engineering and testing teams.

OPSWAT offers software manageability solutions to streamline technology partnerships between leading technology solutions and software vendors. By enabling seamless compatibility and easy management capabilities, we make connecting your solutions with other software applications effortless.

Our innovative multi-scanning solutions deliver optimized anti-malware protection that increases detection rates without sacrificing performance with slow and cumbersome scans. Because no single anti-malware engine can catch every threat, we combine multiple engines to scan simultaneously, significantly improving the probability of detecting a threat.

A Seriously Advanced Photo Tool – Free Image Analyzer 1.31

 

In the days of film cameras, what you shot was what you got. You took your film, had it developed and that, was that. Unless of course, you were one of the few photo hobbyists who had the equipment, and the skills, to manipulate and improve captured images.

The development of the digital camera has changed all that. Today, you are not necessarily stuck with what you shot. The tech world is full, to overflowing, with photo applications; from low end programs with few capabilities to very high end commercial programs with countless editing capabilities. And from complex applications with high learning curves, to dead simple applications with a point and click interface.

Back in my High School days, I was lucky enough to be hired by a news photographer who taught me camera skills, film development and printing techniques, which have stayed with me. So much so, that even now, I use my camera virtually every day (seriously).

If you’re like me, and you consider yourself a geeky photographer, then Image Analyzer 1.31 (latest release – September 22, 2009), could be just the program you’ve been searching for. This small (1.24MB), free, advanced, feature-rich image editor, comes complete with serious enhancement and analytical tools.

While the program includes all the usual features found in most photo editing tools, such as red-eye removal, resizing, rotating, image cropping, image warping, scanner, camera and printer support, the advanced features would generally be used only by sophisticated users, or professional photographers.

For example, this program excels at a number of higher level tasks including refocusing an out of focus image. As well, using the fractal interpolation plug-in for resizing, even low resolution images can be printed at larger sizes with acceptable quality.

Fast facts:

Automatic brightness, contrast, gamma and saturation adjustment

Build-in conventional and adaptive filters for noise reduction, edge extraction etc.

Retouch tools

Retinex filter for reducing shadows and increasing local contrast

Deconvolution for out-of-focus and motion blur compensation (see below)

Easy red-eye removal

User specified filters in spatial and frequency domain

Resize, rotate, crop and warping of images

Scanner, camera and printer support

File format support:
Read/write BMP, ICO, CUR, WMF, EMF, PNG, MNG, GIF, PCX, JPEG and JPEG 2000 images
Read CR2, RAS, PNM, PGM, PPM, HIPS and Matlab files

Morphological operations

Color model conversion: RGB, CMY, HSI, Lab, YCbCr, YIQ and PCA

Distance, Fourier and discrete cosine transformation

Math expression module for creating and transforming images and advanced “pocket” calculator with equation solver

Plug-in system for adding more specialized features.

Available Plug-ins:

Combine for High Dynamic Range (HDR)

Microscopic imaging

3D modeling

Batch processing

Fractal interpolation

Add text and vector graphics

Raster Export

JPEG 2000 file format handler

TIFF file format handler

Profile line

PCA Color Stretch

8fb Plug-in Interface

Developers’ information

Requirements: Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows NT, Windows 98

Language pack: Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian

There is no tech support for this free application but there is an active forum.

Recommendation: This is a  terrific free program for those those who are familiar with, or interested in, the more technical aspects of image analysis/processing. Considering the high end abilities of this application, it is surprising that it is freeware.

Download at: Download.com

There are additional free graphic software reviews elsewhere on this Blog, including download links. Check out the category Graphic Software on the sidebar.

 

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ThreatFire Updated to Version 4 – Free Protection against Zero-Day Threats

I am an Internet security freak and with good reason. The Internet today presents constantly evolving security risks to computers and operating systems that at times seem to me like science fiction.

Consider; every day there are increasingly more stories about computer viruses, adware, spyware, hackers, spam, denial of service attacks, phishing, vishing and other Internet frauds, so much so that these stories have become commonplace in the news.

The relentless evolution of these increasingly more powerful and destructive attacks against home computer systems has disclosed a gaping hole, a vulnerability to zero-day threats, in many users’ Internet security defenses.

Zero-day threats are those that are defined as malware that has been written and distributed to take advantage of system vulnerabilities, before security developers can create and release counter measures. Without tools that will identify and eliminate these threats to your computer, you run the risk of infection.

A powerful free tool, ThreatFire from PC Tools’ – the developers of the highly regarded Spyware Doctor, blocks malware (including zero-day threats) by analyzing program behavior (heuristics), instead of relying only on a signature based database. ThreatFire works together with your signature based security applications to increase the effectiveness of your total security arsenal.

(Click pic for larger)

When ThreatFire detects a behavior based threat, it goes into analysis overdrive by comparing the threat against its signature database; those threats that are recognized by the database are quarantined immediately.

(Click pic for larger)

Unrecognized threats, or unrecognized behaviors, are assigned a calculated risk level (set by the user), at which point the user has the option of confirming, or blocking the action.

A good example of the effectiveness of this application was made clear to me, recently, when I was checking all of the ports on my home Windows machine, and ThreatFire immediately advised me that the Port Checker was attempting to send email from port 25.

Of course it actually wasn’t, it was simply opening it for testing purposes. But if this port was being opened, and was being used by a bot, ThreatFire would have identified this danger by its behavior, and given me the necessary warning.

(Click pic for larger)

Fast facts:

Immediately Effective with No Complicated Set Up

Proactive Defense against Both Known and Unknown Threats

PC Tools AntiVirus Included for On-demand Scanning

Quarantine and Permanently Remove Threats from Your System

Rootkit Scanner Seeks Out Deeply Hidden Files, Objects and Registry Keys

View Detailed Process Information on All Running Processes

Complementary to Your Existing Antivirus Software

Advanced Custom Configuration Options and Rules Settings

Virtually No Impact on System Performance

More Technical Details Provided on Alerts

Continually Improving Protection Technology

Free email and web-based technical support

Absolutely Free!

Based on my experience with this application, I highly recommend ThreatFire as critical component in your overall Internet security toolbox.

System Requirements: Windows Vista, Windows XP

Download at: ThreatFire

Free Image Analyzer 1.30 – Professional Photo Editor

If you’re a geeky photographer, then Image Analyzer 1.30 (latest release – August 30), could be just the program you’ve been searching for. This small (1.24MB), free, advanced, feature-rich image editor, comes complete with serious enhancement and analytical tools.

At the advanced level, this is not a program for the faint of heart, and requires a good understanding of photographic techniques.

While the program includes all the usual features found in most photo editing tools, such as red-eye removal, resizing, rotating, image cropping, image warping, scanner, camera and printer support, the advanced features would generally be used only by sophisticated users, or professional photographers.

A number of my friends, who are advanced users, tell me this program excels at a number of higher level tasks including refocusing an out of focus image. As well, using the fractal interpolation plug-in for resizing, even low resolution images can be printed at larger sizes with acceptable quality.

Since I am not a sophisticated user, in my view, this is a program best left to those who are familiar with, or interested in, the more technical aspects of image analysis/processing.

Considering the high end abilities of this application, it is surprising that it is freeware.

Quick facts:

Automatic brightness, contrast, gamma and saturation adjustment

Build-in conventional and adaptive filters for noise reduction, edge extraction etc.

Retouch tools

Retinex filter for reducing shadows and increasing local contrast

Deconvolution for out-of-focus and motion blur compensation

Easy red-eye removal

User specified filters in spatial and frequency domain

Resize, rotate, crop and warping of images

Scanner, camera and printer support

Read/write BMP, ICO, CUR, WMF, EMF, PNG, MNG, GIF, PCX, JPEG and JPEG

Read RAS, PNM, PGM, PPM, HIPS and Matlab files

Morphological operations

Color model conversion: RGB, CMY, HSI, Lab, YCbCr, YIQ and PCA

Distance, Fourier and discrete cosine transformation

Math expression module for creating and transforming images

Plug-in system for adding more specialized features

Available Plug-ins:

Microscopic imaging

3D modeling

Batch processing

Fractal interpolation

Add text and vector graphics

Raster Export

TIFF reader

Profile line

PCA Color Stretch

8fb Plug-in Interface

There are additional free graphic software reviews elsewhere on this Blog, including download links. Check out the category Graphic Software on the sidebar.

Requirements: Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista

Download at: Download.com or at the developer’s site MeeSoft.

WOT (Web of Trust) – Participate in Your Own Internet Security

Would you wander through a neighborhood which has a reputation for being jam-packed with predators without appropriate protection? Well, if you lack the required resources to protect yourself on the Internet, you may be doing just that. The Internet neighborhood, after all, is alive with predators intent on stealing your personal information, installing damaging programs on your computer, and misleading you with an online scam.

It was reported recently that fifteen thousand web pages were infected daily between January and March of this year; three times the rate of infection noted in the previous year. More disturbing, seventy nine percent of compromised web pages tracked this year were on legitimate web sites; including web sites belonging to Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and ironically, security vendors.

WOT (Web of Trust), a free Internet Browser resource that has established an impressive 4.5/5.0 star user rating on CNET, tests web sites you are visiting for spyware, spam, viruses, browser exploits, unreliable online shops, phishing, and online scams. WOT which integrates with search engine results from popular search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN and other popular sites, provides impressive protection against Internet predators and helps you avoid unsafe web sites.

The Browser add-on’s icon, displays a color rating for each site you visit, indicating whether a site is safe to use, should be used with caution, or avoided entirely. Using traffic light colors, (green, yellow, and red), WOT leaves you in no doubt as to the safety rating of a web site.

An impressive feature of WOT is the dropdown transparent warning curtain, triggered on visiting a dangerous site.

WOT takes conventional security one step further, by soliciting the opinions of users/members whose views on web site safety are incorporated into the overall site safety rating. The advantages of members participation in exchanging their personal knowledge about a web site, in my view, cannot be overemphasized. It allows for a new and exciting trend in Internet security, and that is the concept of “people driven security”. A concept that encompasses the philosophy, that we are all responsible for each others security on the Internet. According to WOT, the user community now has reputation data on over 18 million sites worldwide.

The shared information on a site’s reputation includes trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy, and critical in the current Internet environment, child safety. As well, to bolster the effectiveness of the protection, WOT uses hundreds of trusted sources including phishing site listings, to keep users protected against rapidly spreading threats.

WOT is designed to work with Internet Explorer and FireFox; the user interface supports English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish and Finnish.

Surf more securely by installing this browser add-on which will provide you with an in-depth site analysis based on real world results. Keep in mind however, that you are your own best protection. Stop · Think · Click

WOT is available for download at: MyWot

Image Analyzer 1.29 – A Free, Seriously Geeky Photo Editor

Image Analyzer 1.29 is a small (1.24MB) free, advanced, feature-rich image editor with serious enhancement and analytical tools. At the advanced level, this is not a program for the faint of heart, and requires a good understanding of photographic techniques.

While the program includes all the usual features found in most photo editing tools, such as red-eye removal, resizing, rotating, image cropping, image warping, scanner, camera and printer support, the advanced features would generally be used only by sophisticated users, or professional photographers.

A number of my friends, who are advanced users, tell me this program excels at a number of higher level tasks including refocusing an out of focus image. As well, using the fractal interpolation plug-in for resizing, even low resolution images can be printed at larger sizes with acceptable quality.

Since I am not a sophisticated user, in my view this is a program best left to those who are familiar with, or interested in, the more technical aspects of image analysis/processing. Considering the high end abilities of this application, it is surprising that it is freeware.

Quick facts:

• Automatic brightness, contrast, gamma and saturation adjustment
• Build-in conventional and adaptive filters for noise reduction, edge extraction etc.
• Retouch tools
• Retinex filter for reducing shadows and increasing local contrast
• Deconvolution for out-of-focus and motion blur compensation
• Easy red-eye removal
• User specified filters in spatial and frequency domain
• Resize, rotate, crop and warping of images
• Scanner, camera and printer support
• Read/write BMP, ICO, CUR, WMF, EMF, PNG, MNG, GIF, PCX, JPEG and JPEG
• Read RAS, PNM, PGM, PPM, HIPS and Matlab files
• Morphological operations
• Color model conversion: RGB, CMY, HSI, Lab, YCbCr, YIQ and PCA
• Distance, Fourier and discrete cosine transformation
• Math expression module for creating and transforming images
• Plug-in system for adding more specialized features

Available Plug-ins:

• Microscopic imaging
• 3D modeling
• Batch processing
• Fractal interpolation
• Add text and vector graphics
• Raster Export
• TIFF reader
• Profile line
• PCA Color Stretch
• 8fb Plug-in Interface

There are additional free graphic software reviews elsewhere on this Blog, including download links. Check out the category Graphic Software on the sidebar

Requirements: Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista

Download at: Download.com

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ThreatFire 3 – Free Protection Against Zero-Day Threats

I am an Internet security freak and I make no apologies for it. The Internet today presents constantly evolving security risks to computers, and operating systems, that sometimes seem to me like science fiction.

Consider that every day there are increasingly more stories about computer viruses, adware, spyware, hackers, spam, denial of service attacks, phishing, vishing and other Internet frauds, so much so that these stories have become commonplace in the news.

The relentless evolution of these more powerful and destructive attacks against home computer systems has disclosed a gaping hole, a vulnerability to zero-day threats, in many users’ Internet security defenses. Zero-day threats are those that are defined as malware that has been written and distributed to take advantage of system vulnerabilities before security developers can create and release counter measures. Without tools that will identify and eliminate these threats to your computer, you run the risk of infection.

A powerful free tool, ThreatFire 3 from PC Tools’ – the developers of the highly regarded Spyware Doctor, blocks malware (including zero-day threats) by analyzing program behavior (heuristics), instead of relying only on a signature based database. ThreatFire 3 works together with your signature based security applications to increase the effectiveness of your security arsenal.

When ThreatFire 3 detects a behavior based threat, it goes into analysis overdrive by comparing the threat against its signature database; those threats that are recognized by the database are quarantined immediately. Unrecognized threats, or behaviors, are assigned a calculated risk level at which point the user has the option of confirming or blocking the action.

A good example of the effectiveness of this application was made clear to me, this week, when I was checking all of the ports on my Windows machine, and ThreatFire 3 immediately advised me that the Port Checker was attempting to send email from port 25. Of course it actually wasn’t, it was simply opening it for testing purposes. But if this port was being opened, and was being used by a bot, ThreatFire 3 would have identified this danger by its behavior and given me the necessary warning.

Based on my experience with this application, I highly recommend it as critical component in your overall Internet security toolbox.

System Requirements: Windows Vista, Windows XP

Download at: ThreatFire

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Get a Risk Analysis of Your Running Processes – ProcessScanner Free

Do you ever wonder about the processes running on your computer? Do you wonder if your anti-malware applications have caught all of the dangerous adware/viruses/Trojans that your computer has been exposed to, as you surfed cyberspace? Do you ever wonder if your machine is as speedy as it could be, or as stable as it needs to be?

Most anti-malware applications have a good, but far from a perfect record of preventing/detecting/removing malware. Since there is no perfect anti-malware application it’s important to be aware of the processes and services that automatically run in the background on your computer. Checking these occasionally, can help you in preventing unwelcome surprises down the road.

Because I’m a security freak, justifiable so I think, I’m always interested in any new tool that can assist me in keeping my machines free of harmful, or potentially harmful, processes or services.

ProcessLibrary.com (a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner), the company that offers what has often been called the world’s leading and most definitive process listing service available for Windows users, recently released ProcessScanner. This small executable not only scans your Windows computer for all running processes, but in addition tells you what’s running, what each process is associated with, and most importantly, a risk analysis of each process.

For example, do you have isass.exe running on your machine? Well if you do, your machine is infected with the Optix.Pro virus which carries in its payload, the ability to disable firewalls and local security protections, as well as a backdoor capability. ProcessScanner will advise you to disable and remove isass.exe immediately.

The information ProcessScanner provides you with can be useful in a number of ways. For example, I continuously notice on machines running XP Professional particularly, the large number of unnecessary processes or services that load on startup, which add limited or no functionally to the specific computer. You might be surprised to find the same situation on your computer where unnecessary processes/services are hogging your system resources and slowing down your computer.

This free service from ProcessLibrary.com can help you determine which of these you can turn off. However, be careful in turning off services. Turn off the wrong one(s), and you may find that you are unable to boot your machine. Spend some time on the Internet investigating which services are safe to turn off, or better yet read, Speedup Your PC – Turn Off Unnecessary Services in XP, on this Blog.

You won’t be alone in trying to determine how to proceed on any specific issue you are unsure of; ProcessLibrary’s forum contains plenty of help and information for new users.

Quick facts:

· No installation required

· Portable device compliant

· Fast scan time

· Identification of all running processes

· Threat level of all processes

· Free

If you’re like me, and you are always looking for additional applications to add to your security toolbox, or you are simply curious about what’s happening behind the scenes on your machine, then I highly recommend you download this program.

Processlibrary.com has been recommended by, amongst others, The Washington Post, USA Today, Yahoo and PC Magazine’s Top 100 Classic Websites.

Download at: processlibrary.com

A Free, Seriously Geeky Photo Editor – Image Analyzer 1.28

Image Analyzer 1.28 is an advanced, free, feature-rich image editor, with serious enhancement and analytical tools. This is not a program for the faint of heart, and requires a good understanding of photographic techniques.

The program contains most image enhancement features found in conventional image editors, plus a number of advanced features generally used only by advanced users, or professional photographers.

Features:

• Automatic brightness, contrast, gamma and saturation adjustment
• Build-in conventional and adaptive filters for noise reduction, edge extraction etc.
• Retouch tools
• Retinex filter for reducing shadows and increasing local contrast
• Deconvolution for out-of-focus and motion blur compensation
• Easy red-eye removal
• User specified filters in spatial and frequency domain
• Resize, rotate, crop and warping of images
• Scanner, camera and printer support
• Read/write BMP, ICO, CUR, WMF, EMF, PNG, MNG, GIF, PCX, JPEG and JPEG Read RAS, PNM, PGM, PPM, HIPS and Matlab files
• Morphological operations
• Color model conversion: RGB, CMY, HSI, Lab, YCbCr, YIQ and PCA
• Distance, Fourier and discrete cosine transformation
• Math expression module for creating and transforming images
• Plug-in system for adding more specialized features

Plug-ins:

• Microscopic imaging
• 3D modeling
• Batch processing
• Fractal interpolation
• Add text and vector graphics
• Raster Export
• TIFF reader
• Profile line
• PCA Color Stretch
• 8fb Plug-in Interface
• Developers’ information

For more information and help, go to the support forum

There is some great free graphic software reviews elsewhere on this Blog with download links.  Checkout the category Graphic Software on the sidebar

Requirements: Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista

Download at: Developers Site