The Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice teamed up for a coast-to-coast crackdown on identity thieves this week.

As with your computer, the best defense against malware is a good offense in the form of security software. Paid mobile security apps are much better at detecting malware in Android devices than free antivirus applications, according to a study by AV Test today. If your business relies at all on smartphones, make sure that you and your employees are protected with the right mobile security package.

Today is Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday for the month of November--the eleventh Patch Tuesday of 2011. It is a light month from Microsoft, with only four security bulletins. The big news, though, is that a zero day flaw being exploited by the Duqu worm is not among the vulnerabilities fixed by Microsoft today.

Figures don't lie, the old aphorism goes, but liars can figure. And after nearly 20 years covering technology, I've realized that you could update that saying to: Benchmarks don't lie, but liars can benchmark.

Today is Patch Tuesday again. The ninth of the year already. Microsoft has released five new security bulletins, and Adobe has joined the party with some security patching of its own today. With all of the vulnerabilities and updates, though, you need to take a step back to prioritize and figure out which patches are most urgent.

Tami asked the Antivirus & Security Software forum why friends are receiving spam that appears to come from her.

In recent weeks, more and more iTunes users have been reporting fraudulent activity on their Apple accounts, reporting hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of bogus purchases. With the reports of this type of fraud on the uptick in recent weeks, many users have been quick to blame Apple or PayPal, as many of the affected iTunes accounts were linked to PayPal accounts.

PDF files are one of the most common, and most trusted document formats out there. However, that trust, combined with the cross-platform use of PDFs makes the Adobe file format one of the most targeted and exploited by malicious attacks as well.

Most of us don't like paying for antivirus (AV) software, but at least home users can rely on one of the free options, such as Microsoft Security Essentials, avast!, or AVG Free.

Security researchers have shown that carefully crafted text messages sent to cell phones via short message service (SMS) can cause them to shutdown without the knowledge of the owner.

The head of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has stopped banking online after nearly falling for a phishing attempt.

Microsoft has sued a Hong Kong seller of mobile ringtones, saying the company used phishing techniques to flood Microsoft Live Messenger users with spam messages.