Author: adminficci

63% of counterfeits infected with malware, claims Microsoft

MICROSOFT Corp has unveiled the results of a South-East Asia internal computer security study which found that 63% of counterfeit software DVDs and laptop computers with illegal copies of Windows and other software had high-risk malware infections and viruses.A staggering 85% of the sampled DVDs and 49% of sampled computers were found to contain malware, the company said in a statement.The analysis was conducted by Microsoft’s Security Forensics team on albeit only 118 samples purchased from resellers in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.In total, this preliminary test sample found nearly 2,000 instances of malware – 403 of them unique – including highly dangerous backdoors, hijackers, droppers, bots, crackers, password stealers, and trojans.The research further revealed that in 77% of the computers examined, Windows Update had been disabled or re-routed to third-party services. With Windows Update disabled, computer systems bypass genuine software checks and are also denied access to critical security updates, leaving them defenseless against malicious cyber-attacks, virus infections, and hacking.More interestingly is a new trend that was discovered during the course of the study – 44% of the sampled, seemingly new laptop computers have had the original hard drives swapped with malware-infected, recycled drives installed with pirated software.

Cybercriminals use malware for a range of invasive activities generating illegal profit – from stealing consumers’ banking and credit card information, to spamming their e-mail and social media contacts with fraudulent requests for charitable donations or bogus offers (e.g., for counterfeit prescription drugs).Increasingly, these activities are conducted by or at the direction of organized, for-profit criminal enterprises.For businesses, the risks associated with using malware-infected, pirated software include low IT productivity, critical system failures and disruptions of service, and theft of confidential company data leading to severe financial loss and reputational harm.

“This study clearly shows that using counterfeit software is a dangerous proposition,” said Dr Dzahar Mansor, national technology officer at Microsoft Malaysia.

“Pirated software is a breeding ground for cybercrime, and the cost of using it is potentially much higher than the price of buying genuine in the first place,” he added.

According to the 2012 Norton Cybercrime Report, the global consumer cost of cybercrime is US$100 billion annually, with an average per-victim impact of US$197.

“Using a PC with counterfeit software is like moving into a high-crime neighborhood and leaving your doors open – it’s incredibly risky,” said Zahri Hj. Yunos(pic above, left), acting chief executive officer of CyberSecurity Malaysia (CSM), an agency under Malaysia’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

“People with counterfeit software have no guarantee that their sensitive data, activities and communications will be safe from cybercriminals that intend to do harm. As the results of this study show, the danger of counterfeit is real and consumers should insist on genuine software when purchasing a new PC,” he added.

Microsoft advises consumers to take the following steps to avoid the inadvertent purchase of counterfeit software:

• Always ask for genuine software.
• Buy from a trusted reseller and avoid deals that seem “too good to be true”.
• Ensure all software purchases come in their original packaging.
• When buying a PC with Windows, look for the genuine label and Certificate of Authenticity that Microsoft requires be affixed to all PCs on which Windows is pre-installed. As a further check after purchase, log on tohttp://www.howtotell.com/to confirm the label is authentic.

Customers who suspect they’ve received pirated or counterfeit software are encouraged to report it atwww.microsoft.com/piracy. Since 2007, the company has received more than 10,000 piracy reports from within South-East Asia – many from people who bought a name-brand PC, paying more money to get “the real thing,” but ending up with far greater risk and liability at the hands of counterfeiters.

Microsoft said it is currently expanding its research in South-East Asia to include an even larger sample of PCs and DVDs containing pirated software, and expects to publish the full study results and analysis during the first quarter of 2013.

http://www.digitalnewsasia.com/digital-economy/63-percent-of-counterfeits-infected-with-malware-claims-microsoft

Swiss technology battles fake drugs

Counterfeit drugs have become one of the main health problems in developing countries. A device developed by three Swiss universities that identifies fake drugs could save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.“The phenomenon of fake drugs reached catastrophic dimensions a long time ago for the inhabitants of the world’s poorest regions,” said Claude Rohrbasser, retired head of industrial technology at the College of Engineering and Architecture of Fribourg.“So several years ago we said to ourselves that with our knowledge and technological possibilities, we could do something to help these people.”The Fribourg institute joined forces with the Geneva University Hospitals and Geneva-Lausanne School of Pharmacy to develop a low-cost system that identifies whether a drug is real or fake in just a few minutes.The prototype of the ECB (budget capillary electrophoresis) was unveiled in 2008.“The devices on the market cost at least SFr100,000 ($110,000). The ECB is only SFr10,000. For this amount we can find sponsors, whereas for SFr100,000 it would be pretty tricky,” said Rohrbasser, now president of Pharmelp, an association created by the initiative’s promoters to make the ECB available in developing countries.

Simple and effective

Despite its complicated name, the ECB represents probably the easiest – and at the same time most efficient – solution yet developed to detect and measure organic compounds, as well as drugs, proteins and amino acids.The ECB enables the analysis of 80 per cent of the 200 core medicines identified by the World Health Organization (WHO).“Our aim was to develop an instrument that was extremely robust and as simple as possible from a functional point of view. This was to reduce the problem of a lack of spare parts and facilitate the training of staff in the countries where it would be used,” said Serge Rudaz, associate professor at Geneva University’s School of Pharmaceutical Sciences.Another advantage of the ECB is that it uses a minimum dose of solvent – barely a millionth of a litre – per analysis.“In recent years, some solvents necessary for this analysis have gone off the market or have undergone major price increases, to the point of becoming unaffordable for health operators in developing countries,” Rudaz said.

· Counterfeited medicines

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), less than 20 per cent of counterfeited medicines are comparable to the original product.In more than 80 per cent of cases the counterfeited medicines do not correspond to the information in the package inserts, which can severely endanger patients’ health.Thirty-two per cent of seriously altered mediciations don’t contain any of the active ingredient the medicine is supposed to contain, in 21 per cent the active ingredient differs from the original substance, in 20 per cent there is too little of the active ingredient, and in 8 per cent there are impurities in the drug.

· Electrical pulse

The analysis takes just 20 minutes on average. First of all the drug is solubilised with water. A small quantity of the substance is set in motion by an electrical pulse (hence the name electrophoresis), then moves along a tube thinner than a hair (hence capillary). 
Using ultraviolet rays, the device measures the duration of the drug’s journey, which is recorded on a normal laptop computer.

“The ECB can’t identify the medicinal composition – it verifies whether this duration corresponds to that of the original product. Each drug has its own charge and thus moves at a different speed,” Rudaz explained.To date, the institutes have produced around ten ECB devices. The first three are already being used by the national health laboratory in Bamako, Mali, by Dakar University in Senegal and by the health authorities in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.Other projects are planned in Congo, Ghana and the Ivory Coast.

· Kidney problems

In these countries, a high percentage of drugs in circulation are counterfeit. In the majority of cases they are completely or partially lacking in the active ingredient listed in the packaging.According to the WHO, these fake drugs are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people a year around the world, including 200,000 people with malaria.What’s more, for several years increasing numbers of impure drugs have been circulating, coming mostly from Asia.“Over the long term, these attack the kidneys – we’re noticing more and more patients in poor countries who need dialysis. The consequences are terrible, given the meagre means available,” Rohrbasser said.“Two years ago I visited the dialysis centre of the hospital in Bamako. There were ten or so patients lined up on beds. The head doctor told me they would die within a week because there weren’t any more filters for dialysis. This is another aspect of the problem of fake drugs.”

· Official challenges

The trafficking of these drugs is tied to the inadequacy of health networks in poorer countries, above all outside the main inhabited centres. Many people get the drugs from travelling salesmen, who move from village to village.“You’ve also got to bear in mind the tight financial circumstances. In many African countries people will normally buy only one or two pills at a time. And often they’ll do this at market, where prices are lower than in pharmacies and hospitals,” Rohrbasser said.But the official sales channels aren’t without problems either. Political instability and war – as is the case currently in Mali – often obstruct the already precarious control measures for the drugs.“But our aim is not to do the job of the police or customs – rather it’s to make available to the authorities, to hospitals and to universities an instrument which can identify fake products,” he said.This pragmatism is shared by Serge Rudaz. “There’s no way we can solve the problem of counterfeiting in the countries with which we’re working. But our presence bears witness to the interest of our universities and of Switzerland in tackling the serious problems [these countries] face.”

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/science_technology/Swiss_technology_battles_fake_drugs.html?cid=34595272

Counterfeit medicine from Asia threatens lives in Africa

International health experts are warning of a mounting health crisis in parts ofAfricabecause of an influx of counterfeit medicine from Asia that is playing havoc with the treatment of diseases such as malaria. Porous borders in Africa coupled with indifferent oversight inChinaare combining to turn the continent and its pressing health problems into a free-for-all for maverick manufacturers, some of whom are producing pills with no active ingredients at all.Precise data is hard to track down because of the informal nature of African health systems. But several recentstudieswarnthat as many as one-third of malaria drugs inUgandaandTanzaniaare fake or substandard, with most believed to originate in China orIndia.Apart from the lives lost, there are additional concerns about drug resistance building in east Africa, experts say. “It’s a crisis any time someone dies,” Nick White, who chairs the Wellcome Trust’s south-east Asia major overseas programmes and the WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network (Wwarn). “It’s a massive problem that people have simply ignored. It’s not like a boil that’s beginning to burst because it’s been a problem for a long time. What has happened is we are beginning to recognise it more.”Laurie Garett, senior fellow for global health at the US Council on Foreign Relations, said: “Nobody has a head count – or a body count – on numbers of Africans that have died as a result. But China’s role certainly has been dreadful.”David Nahamya, chief drug inspector for the Ugandan national drug authority, said: “What we are told is this, if someone wants to counterfeit a drug, they just take the package to China and they can make it in thousands. You have seen how they make it there. They can copy anything.”· An increasing list of studies and surveys about fake, counterfeit and substandard drugs has emerged in recent years, but because of deeply entrenched interests from all sides – governments, NGOs and pharmaceutical companies – there has been great reluctance to call the scourge of killer medications in Africa and elsewhere a crisis.This is despite the fact that everything from life-saving Aids medication to emergency contraception are being copied, faked and made with shoddy components on a huge scale.Patrick Lukulay, vice president of the US Pharmacopeial Convention’s global health impact programmes, said it was no secret that the majority of dangerous medications came from China and India, as those countries had the world’s largest production bases for both active ingredients and finished drugs.While India has stepped up oversight, “China is only now just catching on”, he added.Though it may seem like an immense amount of trouble to counterfeit a £3 packet of malaria pills, Lulukay noted that the global trade was estimated at £46bn a year. Counterfeiters know their markets well and target medications accordingly. Efforts to combat the activity are in their infancy.”If you want to be efficient in fighting it, you have to have a very strong regulatory authority, very strong collaborations, very good distribution networks and good co-operation between governments,” said Sabine Kopp, who manages the anti-counterfeiting and medicines quality assurance programmes at theWorld Health Organisation.As yet, none of those components are in place and counterfeiters, apparently unconcerned with harming sick people in developing countries, continue making huge profits.It is a loss to global aid organisations, as well, said Dr Nick White. “Think of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, you spend on pills to help people in poor countries,” he said. “It’s bonkers not to make sure they’re authentic and instead people are ending up with shoddy pills from China.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/23/africa-counterfeit-medicines-trade

Counterfeit booze seized in Wycombe

Trading standards officers swooped on 18 shops across Buckinghamshire and seized counterfeit and ‘grey import’ alcohol from four of them. Their action was part of a joint operation with 10 other local authorities in south east England, that targeted 246 shops. Seizures were made at 19 shops overall. One of the shops where the booze was seized was in High Wycombe. Officers have this week issued a warning to festive season shoppers to be alert to counterfeit alcohol on the market. Gina Green, Buckinghamshire County Council Trading Standards Team Leader, said: “Bootleg booze makers usually add methanol because it’s clear and odourless. But after a few hours it can induce severe stomach ache, dizziness, blurred vision, breathing difficulties, and coma. What’s more, these concoctions are often created in very unhygienic conditions.”Gina said that although it is not easy for people to identify counterfeits on the shelves, once opened the smell or taste could give it away. With ‘grey imports’, customers should look for wonky labels and tell-tale excess glue, and also compare the fill levels of bottles on the shelf.Martin Phillips, cabinet member for community engagement, said: “We need to be particularly vigilant around the festive season and I have the greatest confidence in our Trading Standards teams who act speedily in their fight against counterfeits that could be dangerous to our residents.”Shops from which the bottles of counterfeit Champagne, vodka and wine were seized were in Denham, High Wycombe and Buckingham. Gina said her team was advising traders to ensure they ordered stock from trustworthy sources.

http://www.bucksfreepress.co.uk/news/10123092.Counterfeit_booze_seized_in_Wycombe/?ref=rss