Sometimes, fear-mongering can have the opposite effect – it makes you feel that you are safe because the people crying wolf seem to have raised the alarm once too often. Then, one day, the wolf really turns up.

Last week, I found a strange thing happening on my wife’s two-week-old Samsung Galaxy Note. There was a notification message that kept popping up sporadically, asking her to join a contest to win an iPad.

It seemed suspicious, but these days, with the endless spam SMSes from property agents in Singapore, you’d think it’s just another piece of spam and to just click on the notification to delete it. Instead, doing so brought me to the browser, which had its homepage changed to a strange-looking search engine.

I sat up immediately. I realised later, from searching up the Internet, that my wife’s phone had been infected by ad-ware, which had probably been hidden in some of the games she downloaded a few days ago.
…

A recent survey commissioned by anti-virus maker Norton found that 76 per cent of Singaporeans would rather say no to US$1 million than allow strangers unlimited access to their computers. …

Remember those funny Apple ads that said Macs don’t suffer from viruses and other malware, like your lousy, uncool PC?

Well, this week, in the biggest security threat yet to Apple’s computers, some 600,000 Macs were said to be affected by the Flashback trojan, which could steal passwords and other personal information from unsuspecting users.

The good news is that the malicious software is now “trending downward”, according to an advisory put out today by security firm Symantec, but it estimates that as many as 270,000 machines are still infected with it.

…

Net surfers heading to Asiaone, the Singapore Press Holdings site offering a lot of the publishing company’s newspaper articles, were prevented from entering the news site in the past two days, as it was hit by a “malicious malware attack“.

The news portal acknowledged the problem on Wednesday, saying that users faced error messages on their browsers, which prevented them from entering the site. …