Windows Secrets Newsletter • Issue 294 • 2011-06-23 • Circulation: over 400,000

By Brett Taylor The OCZ RevoDrive X2 isn’t your grandmother’s hard drive — or even your mother’s. This high-performance storage uses a PCI Express slot with x4 bandwidth mode for extreme speeds in both write and read. OCZ sent over a 240 GB model that can read at up to 740 MB per second, write up to 720 MBps, and perform up to 120,000 I/Os per second (IOps) — astounding numbers, especially compared to mechanical drives.

Figure 1. The blazingly fast OCZ RevoDrive X2 solid-state hard drive comes on a PCIe card.

Take a look at these stats:

• Available in 100 GB to 960 GB (1 TB) capacities
  
• PCIe interface (x4)
  
• For use as primary boot drive or data storage
  
• 4x SATA
  
• Internal RAID 0
  
• 181.07 (L) x 21.59 (W) x 125.08 (H) millimeters
  
• Shock Resistance: 1500 g
  
• Seek Time: 0.1 ms
  
• Operating Temp: 0 °C – 70 °C
  
• Storage Temp: -45 °C – 85 °C
  
• Power Consumption: 4.3 watts, idle; 8.3 watts, active
  
• MTBF: 2,000,000 hours
  
• 3-Year Warranty
  
• Compatible with Windows XP 32/64, Vista 32/64, Windows 7 32/64
  

By Robert Vamosi Microsoft is claiming success with a feature in IE 9 that aims to quash malware hidden in application downloads. But false positives and false digital certificates keep the feature from being perfect.

Since Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft has been flagging known phishing sites. With IE 8 came SmartScreen, an enhancement that added the ability to block sites known to contain malicious software. IE 9 added SmartScreen Application Reputation, which goes one step further and attempts to block malicious downloads. Microsoft says, “Since the release of IE 8, SmartScreen has blocked more than 1.5 billion attempted malware attacks.” That’s roughly 2 to 5 million attacks per day.

Internet Explorer 9 SmartScreen and MSE

On the surface, that statistic sounds about right. In the blog, Microsoft cites an unnamed Trojan the company claims was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times — but none of Microsoft’s IE 9 users got infected. Microsoft said its SmartScreen Filter stopped the Trojan within the first hour, whereas the antivirus products took another 10 hours to create the first antivirus signature.

In my May 19 In the Wild column, I stated that Microsoft Security Essentials lacks the necessary heuristics to block new malware before a new signature file can be produced. Perhaps Microsoft is assuming that everyone using MSE is using IE 9 and not some other browser. In the May 17 blog, Microsoft states confidently, “99 percent of IE 9 users who clicked to download this malicious program chose to delete or not run the program from the Application Reputation unknown-program warning.”

Perhaps it’s unfortunate that fewer and fewer people use any of the IE versions (as Woody Leonhard reported in his June 9 story, “Internet Explorer loses market share rapidly”) as their primary browser, but of those people who do, only the IE 9 users can be counted in this impressive-sounding percentage.

Symantec offers Norton Download Insight

Microsoft is not the only security company tracking the reputation of downloads. Symantec first introduced similar technology in its Norton Security products in 2009. Norton Download Insight looks at download applications that have been blocked by Norton subscribers worldwide. If you’re using any of the major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, or Safari), Norton immediately displays a screen that says whether the downloaded file has a good reputation (i.e., is unlikely to be malicious).