This week sees the 25th Virus Bulletin conference, which takes place in Prague from 30 September to 2 October. We spoke to Virus Bulletin’s editor, Martijn Grooten, about how threats have changed over the last 25 years. My colleagues and I have been very busy preparing for this week’s 25th annual Virus Bulletin International Conference, but on the occasion...

The morality of blocking ads is a perplexing dilemma. That was made clear when Marco Arment – developer of the Peace ad-blocker that shot to the top of Apple’s paid app list when Apple rolled out iOS 9 and allowed users to add ad-blocking extensions for the first time – pulled a 180-degree turn and...

We’ve written several reports over the past year about a malware toolkit that uses Microsoft Word as its delivery vehicle. The idea is to package malware inside a Word document in such a way that the file looks innocent, with no macros (Word program code), no embedded programs, or other content that might make a...

You’ve probably heard of “extreme selfies” taken by people snapping photos of themselves in potentially dangerous locations and scenarios. There’s more than 9400 posts on Instagram with the hashtag #extremeselfie, and the trend has only accelerated with the advent of the selfie stick. A lot of these selfies are harmless hijinks, but there’s been a rash of media stories recently concerning people...

Uber users this week have found themselves – or, at any rate, their accounts – magically whisked around the world to ride through the city streets of China. Below are a few tweets from those who’ve found that Chinese fraudsters had used the hacked accounts to take free trips. Kirby Bittner was one such: @Uber...

Watch out, iDevice owners! Siri has opened the pod bay door to let snoopers in. Barely a week after the release of iOS 9, a hacker has found a way for snoops to access your contacts and photos and send messages without your passcode. The bug affects iOS 9 and iOS 9.0.1 on iPhones, iPads and iPods....

Many teens consider online bullying to be worse than face-to-face bullying, a survey of teenagers has found. After all, cyberbullying can happen around the clock, it’s relentless, and it’s driven by crowd behaviour – in fact, you can consider it a horrible manifestation of crowd-sourcing. The survey of 4720 teenagers around the world found that...

Google charges advertisers for YouTube ad views in spite of correctly spotting them as being fake views generated by bots – no human eyeballs involved – a group of European researchers have claimed. The researchers behind the study came to the conclusion that Google does a good job at weeding out bogus YouTube video views...

A new security company known as Zerodium has come up with a 7-figure way to make a very loud splash as it enters the field. It’s got $1 million (about £651,000) in bug bounty money burning a hole in its pocket, and it’s looking to spend it on what’s thought to be the biggest bounty...

You’ve probably read all sorts of to-and-fro about Apple’s App Store this week. Until now, the App Store has been to the malware scene what the planet Earth was to Douglas Adams’s HHGttG: Mostly harmless. That changed a few days ago, when Palo Alto networks published a series of articles about malware that had shown...