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News

• Study: Hackers, IT pros share personal information online

  Hackers apparently can be just as careless as their victims.

• Android users: Advice to protect your phones

  Android smartphone users can take some commonsense precautions to protect their personal data from being stolen -- important advice considering an app developer purports to know how to take the information in under 60 seconds.

• Malware able to record phone conversations looming: BitDefender

  The time will come for when malware evolves to record smartphone conversations and Android continues to be exploited, according to an international security expert.

• Microsoft Security Essentials struggles in antivirus tests

  Microsoft's popular free antivirus program Security Essentials has put in a mediocre showing in the latest quarterly tests from German test outfit AV-Test.org, finishing second bottom out of 22 products.

• Antivirus 2011: Digital defenders

  If you haven't bought a new version of your antivirus software in a couple of years, now may be a good time to do so. Malware is evolving faster than ever, and the latest generation of antivirus software is better equipped to handle this rapid pace of change. If your antivirus software is a few years old, it may not be able to defend against this on­­slaught effectively, even if you faithfully download new virus definitions. In recent years, the technology that powers antivirus software has changed dramatically: An antivirus package you purchased a few years ago may be able to stop known viruses and other known malware, but brand-new, as-yet unknown viruses can be more dangerous, and newer products do a much better job of stopping them.

• BitDefender Antivirus Pro 2011

  BitDefender Antivirus Pro 2011 ($US40 for a one-year, three-PC license as of 11/23/2010) ranks second in our roundup of 2011 paid antivirus software. In our tests, it did a good job at detecting malware, and was the top performer at removing infections from a PC, which pushed it up the leaderboard, but it had some trouble blocking live malware attacks, preventing it from climbing any higher.

• Virgin Media tracks Zeus Trojan using white hats

  ISP Virgin Media is now using organisations such as The Shadowserver Foundation to work out which of its customers might be part of botnets spreading the dangerous Zeus online banking Trojan.

• Bad BitDefender update clobbers Windows PCs

  Users of the BitDefender antivirus software started flooding the company's support forums Saturday, apparently after a faulty antivirus update caused 64-bit Windows machines to stop working.

• BitDefender partner site hit by hackers

  Hackers elicited customer details from a Portuguese partner site associated with the security company BitDefender, the second intrusion in recent days targeting computer security companies.

• Security software performs poorly in exploit test

  Security software suites are doing a poor job of detecting when a PC's software is under attack, according to Danish vendor Secunia.