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.
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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. …

What’s an anti-virus security software company like Trend Micro got to do with clouds?

Well, they believe that the next big IT disruption will be cloud computing. Moving into security for clouds is thus a necessary evolution path for the 21-year old software security company.

After their Asia Pacific media day conference in Macau today this point was made really clear. Let me explain.

Customers rightly expect the software they’ve bought to just work. Security should be baked into the product rather than bolted on as an additional cost. The good news is that we’re moving towards this trend, e.g. operating systems bundled with anti-virus and firewalls, etc.

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