Symantec has discovered over a dozen apps with malicious code that could cede control of your smartphone to perpetrators.

In a recent blog post, the security company said the apps, which are hosted on the Android Market, can be used to propagate a “bot-like threat that can receive commands to carry out certain actions, as well as steal information from the device”. …

If IBM researchers get their way, remembering passwords will soon be a thing of the past. Big Blue has recently published a video of what it thinks will become reality by 2016, such as mind reading and generating electricity from human activities, among other predictions: …

If you’ve been using a free Android anti-malware app to protect your phone against malicious software, take note.

According to tests conducted by AV-Test, which bills itself as an independent IT security and anti-virus research specialist, the most popular free anti-malware apps on the Android Market do not offer reliable protection against malware. The company also partners with PC World magazine to review security products.

Zoner AntiVirus Free was the only free app with a respectable result in the test. The security app, which boasts of 50,000 to 100,000 installations, detected eight out of 10 malicious apps. …

Singaporeans are still leery of doing financial transactions on the Internet, according to a recent survey by Paypal.

The research study, which was commissioned by PayPal and executed by Nielsen, collected over one thousand responses from Sinagporeans in a two-week survey period from end July to early August 2011.

The key criteria to be included in the study was having transacted online or through a mobile device in the past three months.

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A new outsourcing wave is expected to emerge in a decade, a new survey has found.

By 2021, three-quarters of Singapore companies say they will outsource the majority of their IT infrastructure, of which half will move their infrastructure to the cloud. The top three cost savings, they say, will come from reducing IT infrastructure costs, implementing a cloud and virtualisation strategy as well as standardising their IT infrastructure.

Conducted by Vanson Bourne, a research firm, the survey polled 480 IT decision makers in Singapore, Germany, France, United States and United Kingdom. The study was commissioned by Savvis, a cloud infrastructure and hosted IT provider. …

If you’ve been paying your credit card bills online, you should be familiar with the token PIN that’s required to access most Internet banking services in Singapore.

This security mechanism is commonly known as two-factor authentication (2FA), which requires users to enter a token-generated PIN, plus the usual username and password to access online banking sites and corporate networks.

Besides financial institutions, the Singapore government and some large corporations have also issued employees with tokens for an added layer of security. …

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has rolled out its Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service to its data centers around the world, including in Singapore, Tokyo and Europe.

Launched in 2009, Amazon VPC lets enterprises privately access a section of AWS, where they can tap computing resources in a virtual network under their control. This includes the selection of IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways, like they would in their own data centres. …

Almost all companies that have made the move to the cloud in the Asia-Pacific region have experienced some form of downtime from their cloud computing services, a new survey has found.

Conducted by CA Technologies, the IT management software company, the survey revealed that 95 percent of 1,086 respondents in eight countries admitted they have incurred application downtime and data losses over the past year.

Failure in IT systems in areas such as network, storage, hardware and software were the main culprits, affecting nearly three-quarters of surveyed organisation from Australia, China, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and Taiwan.

These outages could cost companies around US$350,000, according to a previous CA Technologies study.

CA said the “high level of data loss” indicates a lack of readiness for these failures among businesses. Just a quarter say they have comprehensive disaster recovery plans and 38 percent say they have not achieved their disaster recovery objectives despite testing their disaster recovery plans at least once a year.

When asked about the barriers to improving data protection and disaster recovery operations, 45 percent of companies pointed to a lack of budget and 42 percent said there was inadequate buy-in from senior management.

Despite the bugbears, 42 percent of companies surveyed said the cloud continues to play an important role in their disaster recovery and data protection plans.

More than half of companies said they will invest in managing a hybrid cloud environment, where private clouds are supplemented with IT resources on public clouds. A third of respondents plan to use public clouds in their backup plans and 31 percent intend to better their private cloud investments.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved a program to expand the Internet address system’s top level domains (TLD) beyond the familiar suffixes such as .com and .net.

Under a new TLD program, companies, entrepreneurs and communities can apply and run their own TLDs that incorporate their company names, trademarks and location names.

As an example, Sony could switch from Sony.com to .Sony, while cities such as Bangkok could have a domain name such .bangkok. The new domain names will also support languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Arabic. …

Mac users can no longer stake the age-old claim that Apple’s operating system is free from viruses and other forms of malware.

As Mac OS X grows in popularity, with Apple selling a record number of Macs during its most recent quarter, malware writers are expected to be on the prowl for Mac users who haven’t seen a real need for antivirus software.

Last month, Mac OS X security was put to the test when a piece of malware masquerading as security software made its rounds on the Internet using SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques that placed it at the top of search results. …