Following that, the team wrap up with two stories, the first around Air Canada’s chatbot giving incorrect refund advice to a customer, and a spoon-bending magician says he was paid to create a fake Biden robocall.

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• Post-quantum iMessage: the next step in privacy protection
• Google to fix AI picture bot after ‘woke’ criticism
• Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot
• A magician says a Democratic op paid him to make the fake Biden call

To wrap up, the team discuss news that international police agencies have taken down LockBit – the infamous ransomware gang. Additionally, the team discuss a bizarre story around Artificial Intelligence, blue aliens and job applications – yes, really.

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• Big tech vows action on ‘deceptive’ AI in elections
• Feds Want to Ban the World’s Cutest Hacking Device
• UK leads disruption of major cyber-criminal gang
• Service Jobs Now Require Bizarre Personality Test From AI Company

From there the team discuss two final stories, the first around a virus that was released onto the Valhiem gaming Discord channels, causing havoc as it was spread. The final story looks at a recent Interpol campaign, dubbed ‘Operation Synergia,’ which resulted in 31 arrests and over 1,300 C2 (command and control) servers being taken down.

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• Inside the Underground Site Where ‘Neural Networks’ Churn Out Fake IDs
• Taylor Swift deepfakes spark calls in Congress for new legislation
• Valheim Discord servers locked after hacker releases virus
• Interpol operation Synergia takes down 1,300 servers used for cybercrime

To wrap up, the team discuss news around the recent 23andMe data breach.  If you like what you heard, please consider subscribing.

George Carlin’s Family Takes This AI Bullsh*t to Court

Mozilla says Apple’s new browser rules are ‘as painful as possible’ for Firefox

British lawmakers question legality of live facial recognition technology

23andMe data breach: Hackers stole raw genotype data, health reports

To wrap up, the team talk about the latest craze sweeping the gaming world – PalWorld.

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• ‘Mother of all breaches’ data leak reveals 26 billion account records stolen from Twitter, LinkedIn, more
• The Biden Deepfake Robocall Is Only the Beginning
• DPD error caused chatbot to swear at customer
• ‘Pokémon with guns’ sells 5m copies in three days

Our Kaspersky Standard security solution was named Product of the Year 2023 after in-depth testing by AV-Comparatives

What does “Product of the Year” actually mean?

The tests were carried out on our basic security solution for home users — Kaspersky Standard — but its outstanding results apply equally to all our endpoint products. The reason is simple: all our solutions use the same detection and protection technologies stack that was thoroughly tested by AV-Comparatives.

Thus, this top award, Product of the Year 2023, applies equally to our more advanced home protection solutions — Kaspersky Plus and Kaspersky Premium — and also our business products, such as Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business and Kaspersky Small Office Security.

So what does it take to earn the coveted Product of the Year title?

A security solution needs to take part in seven tests throughout the year and consistently achieve the highest Advanced+ score in each of them. These tests examine the quality of protection against common threats and targeted attacks, resistance to false positives, and the impact on overall system performance. This golden triad of metrics forms the basis of a comprehensive evaluation of security solution performance.

That the testing is continuous over the course of a year is important since malware developers hardly sit around twiddling their thumbs — new threats emerge all the time, and existing ones evolve with breathtaking speed. Consequently, security solution developers must keep moving forward at the same pace. That’s why assessing performance at a single point in time is misleading — to get a true picture of a solution’s effectiveness requires extensive and repeated testing all year long. Which is precisely what AV-Comparatives does.

AV-Comparatives examined 16 security solutions from the largest vendors in its tests. Winning such a significant contest clearly demonstrates the highest level of protection provided by our products.

The seven rounds of tests — some of which individually lasted several months — that our protection took part in to eventually win the Product of the Year award were the following:

1. March 2023: Malware Protection Test spring series
2. April 2023: Performance Test spring series
3. February–May 2023: Real-World Protection Test first series
4. September 2023: Malware Protection Test autumn series
5. September–October 2023: Advanced Threat Protection Test
6. October 2023: Performance Test autumn series
7. July–October 2023: Real-World Protection Test second series

To earn AV-Comparatives’ Product of the Year title, a security solution needs to get the highest score in each stage of testing. And our product rose to the challenge: in each of the tests listed above, Kaspersky Standard scooped the top score — Advanced+.

The Product of the Year award went to Kaspersky Standard based on top marks in all seven of a series of AV-Comparatives’ tests in 2023

How AV-Comparatives tests security solutions

Now for a closer look at AV-Comparatives’ testing methodology. The different tests evaluate the different capabilities of the security solutions taking part.

Malware Protection Test

This test examines the solution’s ability to detect prevalent malware. In the first phase of the test, malicious files (AV-Comparatives uses just over 10,000 malware samples) are written to the drive of the test computer, after which they’re scanned by the tested security solution — at first offline, without internet access, and then online. Any malicious files that were missed by the protective solution during static scanning are then run. If the product fails to prevent or reverse all the malware’s actions within a certain time, the threat is considered to have been missed. Based on the number of threats missed, AV-Comparatives assigns a protection score to the solution.

Also during this test, the security solutions are evaluated for false positives. High-quality protection shouldn’t mistakenly flag clean applications or safe activities. After all, if one cries wolf too often, the user will begin to ignore the warnings, and sooner or later malware will strike. Not to mention that false alarms are extremely annoying.

The final score is based on these two metrics. An Advanced+ score means reliable protection with a minimum of false positives.

Real-World Protection Test

This test focuses on protection against the most current web-hosted threats at the time of testing. Malware (both malicious files and web exploits) is out there on the internet, and the solutions being tested can deploy their whole arsenals of built-in security technologies to detect the threats. Detection and blocking of a threat with subsequent rollback of all changes can occur at any stage: when opening a dangerous link, when downloading and saving a malicious file, or when the malware is already running. In any of these cases, the solution is marked a success.

As before, both the number of missed threats and also the number of false positives are taken into account for the final score. Advanced+ is awarded to products that minimize both these metrics.

Advanced Threat Protection Test

This test assesses the ability of the solution to withstand targeted attacks. To this end, AV-Comparatives designs and launches 15 attacks to simulate real-world ones, using diverse tools, tactics and techniques, with various initial conditions and along different vectors.

A test for false positives is also carried out. This checks whether the solution blocks any potentially risky, but not necessarily dangerous, activity (such as opening email attachments), which increases the level of protection at the expense of user convenience and productivity.

Performance Test

Another critical aspect of a security solution’s evaluation is its impact on system performance. Here, the lab engineers emulate a number of typical user scenarios to evaluate how the solution under test affects their run time. The list of scenarios includes:

• Copying and recopying files
• Archiving and unpacking files
• Installing and uninstalling programs
• Starting and restarting programs
• Downloading files from the internet
• Web browsing

Additionally, system-performance drops are measured against the PCMark 10 benchmark.

Based on these measurements, AV-Comparatives calculates the total impact of each solution on system performance (the lower this metric, the better), then applies a statistical model to assign a final score to the products: Advanced+, Advanced, Standard, Tested, Not passed. Naturally, Advanced+ means minimal impact on computer performance.

What other AV-Comparatives awards did Kaspersky pick up in 2023?

Besides Kaspersky Standard being named Product of the Year, our products received several other important awards based on AV-Comparatives’ tests in 2023:

• Real World Protection 2023 Silver
• Malware Protection 2023 Silver
• Advanced Threat Protection Consumer 2023 Silver
• Best Overall Speed 2023 Bronze
• Lowest False Positives 2023 Bronze
• Certified Advanced Threat Protection 2023
• Strategic Leader 2023 for Endpoint Prevention and Response Test 2023
• Approved Enterprise Business Security 2023

We have a long-standing commitment to using independent research by recognized test labs to impartially assess the quality of our solutions and address identified weaknesses when upgrading our technologies. For 20 years now, the independent test lab AV-Comparatives has been putting our solutions through their paces, confirming time and again our quality of protection and conferring a multitude of awards.

Throughout the whole two decades, we’ve received the highest Product of the Year award seven times; no other vendor of security solutions has had such a number of victories. And if we add to this all the Outstanding Product and Top Rated awards we’ve also received over the years, it turns out that Kaspersky security solutions have received top recognitions from AV-Comparatives’ experts a full 16 times in 20 years!

Besides this, AV-Comparatives has also awarded us:

• 57 Gold, Silver, and Bronze awards in a variety of specialized tests
• Two consecutive Strategic Leader awards in 2022 and 2023, for high results in protection against targeted attacks by the Kaspersky EDR Expert solution
• Confirmation of 100% anti-tampering protection (Anti-Tampering Test 2023)
• Confirmation of 100% protection against LSASS attacks (LSASS Credential Dumping Test 2022)
• Confirmation of top-quality Network Array Storage protection (Test of AV solution for Storage)
• and numerous other awards

Learn more about the awards we’ve received, and check out our performance dynamics in independent tests from year to year by visiting our TOP 3 Metrics page.

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• AI poisoning could turn open models into destructive “sleeper agents”
• Defending reality: Truth in an age of synthetic media
• eBay pays $3m fine in blogger harassment case
• China’s gambling crackdown spawned wave of illegal online casinos

To wrap up, the team discuss fake news on Twitter X via stolen gold-check mark accounts.

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• Dutch man sabotaged Iranian nuclear program without Dutch government’s knowledge
• More non-fiction authors are suing OpenAI and Microsoft
• Experts: 5% Chance AI Kills Us All
• Fake and Stolen X Gold Accounts Flood Dark Web

From there the team discuss Securelist’s story of the year: Generative A.I and it’s impact on cyber-security.

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• EU agrees landmark deal on regulation of artificial intelligence
• ChatGPT tool could be abused by scammers and hackers
• Story of the year: the impact of AI on cybersecurity

Additionally, this week the team sat down with Vidit Gujrathi, Chess grandmaster and Maher Yamout, Lead Security Researcher at Kaspersky to talk about Chess, cyber-security and how the two are more connected than you might think.

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• Booking[.]com hackers increase attacks on customers
• UK porn watchers could have faces scanned