Protect Your Entire Network from Pornography, Malicious Sites, and More

We are pleased to announce a brand new system for blocking objectionable and malicious content that works for entire networks. Whether you have 2 or 2000 computers, this is a simple solution that installs quickly and protects every computer or Internet capable device using your Internet connection.

This is the first system of its kind anywhere. It protects any computer including Windows, Macs, or anything else! Even if you are already using CYBERsitter, this system gives you a network wide extra layer of protection. Almost all of the standard CYBERsitter filters are available and in fact, the filters for this system are considerably larger.

It also includes our exclusive "Malicious" site list which is updated every 60 minutes to give you zero-hour protection against malicious sites, phishing sites, attack sites, malware sites, even "spamvertised" web sites that advertise various shady products and schemes by email. No one else has a list like this. We get well over 20,000 reports per hour and they are immediately analyzed and added to our list if waranted.

The best part is that it is inexpensive and there are no per-computer licensing fees. Your network can have as many protected computers as you want at no extra cost.

For more information, please visit http://www.cybersitterlists.com.

We're Looking for Beta Testers

We get a lot of questions about where CYBERsitter is heading. The classic version has been around for over 13 years now, and as the Internet gets more complicated as well as more dangerous, we are always working on ways to address the need of our customers.

We are working on a new type of CYBERsitter product that will be designed for home, school, and business networks. Unlike the classic version of CYBERsitter, the network version has been designed to simply block objectionable and dangerous content.

The nice thing here is that absolutely NO software will be required to run on the computer. This means no conflicts with other programs, and complete invisibility and security. All that is necessary is a simple and quick change on your broadband router. This also means that any kind of computer can be protected whether they are PCs, Macs, Linux, even iPods and gaming systems. Any computer connected to your wired or wireless network will be protected.

With this version, in additional to traditional adult and objectionable web site blocking, we are placing special focus on malicious web sites. In 2008, these are by far the biggest danger, and the least addressed. Anyone who has ever accidentally clicked on a link in an email or in search results and ended up with a virus knows how dangerous these sites can be.

Probably 75% of our CYBERsitter users that request tech support have computers that have been infected with spyware, viruses, zombies, or other malicious software. Since it seems that anti-virus software does not do a decent job of protecting you, we felt that the best way to handle this is to prevent you from going to the sites that infect your computer in the first place. We have massive data collection mechanisms already in place so we will be able to protect you from malicious web sites within 10 minutes of their first appearance on the Internet!

So, we are looking for a few network users that would like to try this and give us their impressions. There is nothing to download, nothing to install, and absolutely no conflicts. There are also no accidental blocks. For example, our new adult site list has over 2,000,000 verified adult sites by name, and we do not need to use keyword filtering, the primary cause of accidental blocking.

We encourage anyone interested in this leave a comment here or click here to send us an email.

Federal Trade Commission Warns of Scams

With the current financial crisis, computer users now have another risk to worry about. Organized gangs of "Phishers" are sending out emails pretending to come from various banks or government organizations. These emails warn of bank failures or problems with accounts or recent deposits. They try to trick you into divulging personal banking information. DON'T!

For more information and guidelines from the FTC, please visit the link below.


http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/alerts/alt089.shtm

CYBERsitter Adds State Of The Art Phishing, and Malicious Web Site Protection

One of the absolute worst things about the Internet is the massive number of web sites out there that exist for the sole purpose of stealing your personal information or infecting your computer with spyware. It is so bad that we estimate than 90% of our CYBERsitter tech support issues relate directly to some sort of infection on the users computer usually caused by clicking on a link in an email message. The bad guys are really good at this and send millions of messages out daily to unsuspecting users that look completely legitimate. Many of our users have asked us how to block these things and in the past we have recommended various products. Unfortunately none of them are really effective.

So we decided to finally do something about this and create an accurate, up to the minute filter file for CYBERsitter users that will protect them against accessing these sites. One thing most of our CYBERsitter customers don't know about us is that we also publish a world class anti-spam product for mail servers called Alligate. We also publish one of the world's largest lists of known spammer address called MXRate. So we employed our anti-spam technology to capture the domain names linked in verified spam messages so they can be sent to our servers in real time where they are analyzed and cataloged. With over 30,000,000 spam reports every day, we are able to create a highly accurate list of known malicious domains.

This list is maintained for spam blocking as well as a standard CYBERsitter filter file. When used with CYBERsitter, it will not block any email that contains one of these malicious links, but it will filter out the link itself so you will not be able to accidentally click on something dangerous. This was, it will work with any email system without any danger of causing problems accessing your normal email.

To get an idea of what we are doing, we invite you to take a look at the top 100 malicious domain names. It is updated every hour with the latest top 100 bad guys and statistics. This is a new page and we will be prettying it up here as we go along, so please bear with us. You can visit this web page by clicking here.

To use this list in CYBERsitter, just go to the filter list page and click on "Update" to update your filters manually. The new list is in position number 2, and will be checked by default. After updating your lists, if you do not see the new filter, just reboot your computer and everything will be updated.

If you haven't yet updated to CYBERsitter 10, we also recommend you do this as well. This list will work with older versions, however the new malicious web site filter is very large and CYBERsitter 10 will perform better than previous versions.

Russian Cyber-crime Gang Targeting On-line Banking

A gang of cyber criminals operating out of Russia has been uncovered as the purveyors of the "COREFLOOD" trojan. This virus is especially dangerous because it can take snapshots of your screen, capture your keystrokes, and send them to computer servers in the Ukraine. The thieves can then see pictures of anything on your screen and read everything you type. They are specifically targeting on-line banking and use the trojan to see your account numbers and balances. Bank transfers are then initiated diverting the innocent users funds to bank accounts in other countries.

Read the entire story here.

11% of kids have online sex chats

In yet another study about how kids use the Internet, a recent survey revealed that 11% of kids 11-18 years old admitted to having sexually explicit chat sessions. 25% admitted to visiting adult web sites and 10% revealed that they have had meetings with people they first met online.

Almost half the children surveyed admitted that they lie to their parents about what they are doing online and tell their parents they are working on homework as a cover to disguise their activities.

Moreover, the study also concluded that 87% of parents believe that they were completely aware of what content their kids were accessing on the Internet and were confident their kids would not engage in any activities that the parents disapproved of.

Read the whole story at PC Advisor.

Cool and Useful FREE Application for Windows

If you're like us and use your computer a lot, you probably have lots of little yellow sticky notes around your desk space, on your monitor and on your keyboard. Pay a bill. Make a phone call. Order a birthday gift. Whatever you need to remember to do on the computer always seems to end up on a yellow sticky note stuck to the computer.

While reading the latest PC World magazine, we came across a very simple but very cool little program that does sticky notes right, just like real people use them. There have been many sticky notes programs released over the years, but none of them worked the way real sticky notes are actually used. Well, this one does, and it is really handy. You can create a little sticky note and stick it anywhere on your computer screen. You can also make them semi-transparent and make them stay on top of other windows if you like as well as set the colors and font to suit your preferences.

It's called, appropriately, Stickies for Windows. You can get it here and it's completely free.