Smokey’s Security Forums Seasonal Competition 2008 now “Live”

As follow up on this post I can betray that Smokey’s Security Forums Seasonal Competition 2008 is now “Live”.

Like I told before, only registered board members can join the competition. If you are not a member of my board you are invited to register for free and obtain the opportunity to win one of the free security software licenses.

Several top-notch security vendors have participated in the Competiton and provided my board wih  free licenses: AVG, Avira, Comodo, Jetico, Kaspersky, MBAM – MalwareBytes AntiMalware, Tall Emu – Online Armor, Prevx, Sunbelt Vipre and SUPERantispyware. My gratitude to all these vendors!

Good luck to you all with the Competition!

On behalf of Smokey’s Team,

Smokey

Matousec and his Firewall Challenges Hall of Shame 2008/2010 Awardee

To me it is a great pleasure to announce that Matousec and his so called Firewall Challenges is Smokey’s Security Weblog 2008/2010 Hall of Shame Awardee. He realy did all he could to become awarded, there was no reason to deny him anymore this prestigious Award. Congratulations Matousec, well deserved!

Let’s take a look at my motivation to grant Matousec the honor to become member of The Hall. In my “almighty” wisdom I even decided that his stay in The Hall will be definitive.

In April 2008 I already blogged about wrinkles in Matousec’s Firewall Challenges. Instead of taking serious notice of my critism, he decided to ignore entirely my prewarnings. That was a bad sign, however I decided to provide him with the advantage of doubt.

Mentioned ignorant attitude in the past and his recent Firewall Challenge were sufficient to provide him with the honorable Smokey’s Security Weblog 2008/2010 Hall of Shame Award.

Recapitulation to Award Matousec:

- Labeling Firewalls, Behavior Blockers and HIPS with the generic label “Firewalls” and testing these programs subsequent with equal (firewall related) test procedures. This is just one of the reasons that his tests are completely unacceptable.
- Matousec demonstrated again and again to produce unreliable tests and being an untrustworthy person. Concerning the latter, I am thinking at his commercial activities related to his tests.

Conclusion: Matousec’s tests are misleading the reader, disadvantaging several vendors in a unacceptable way and his commercial activities in relation to his tests can be labeled as dubious. My advice: stay far away from his so called “tests”. They are not worth the paper they are written on.

Smokey