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21 Jun 2006

Global director of SophosLabs demonstrates ransomware at APWG summit

Mark Harris
Mark Harris, global director of SophosLabs™, will be presenting at the conference in Brussels

Sophos, a world leader in protecting businesses against computer threats, today announced that Mark Harris, global director of SophosLabs™, will be presenting at the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) conference in Brussels, Belgium, June 27-28, 2006.

Harris will be leading a panel of experts discussing and demonstrating the latest trends in financially motivated malware. As part of this he will be discussing the threats posed by ransomware, and demonstrating the recent Arhiveus Trojan horse.

"Organized cybercriminals are using a variety of methods to steal money from innocent computer users. Ransomware like the Arhiveus Trojan horse effectively 'kidnaps' your data and demands financial payment in order to restore access to your files," said Harris. "It's essential to understand how modern hackers and spammers operate in order to effectively protect against them."

Harris leads SophosLabs™, Sophos's global network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centers, developing round-the-clock protection in order to ensure customers' networks automatically detect and block new threats.

SophosLabs experts were able to reverse engineer the Arhievus Trojan horse and published information on how users could recover their data for free.

More information about the APWG conference can be found on the seminar website at www.antiphishing.org.

About Sophos

More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing complete security solutions that are simple to deploy, manage, and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, mobile and network security solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers.

Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.