Thanks to those of you who have dropped me a line in the last week or so following this story on The Register, “Facebook Troll sends mob against Cluley.”

A 27-year-old man who has been charged almost 60 times with allegations that he used malware to take over victims’ computers and intimidated young women into posing nude for him.

An interesting news story broke this weekend in Germany. According to reports in Der Spiegel, the BND – Germany’s foreign intelligence service – used spyware to monitor the Ministry of Commerce and Industry in Afghanistan.

Confidential documents, passwords and email communications are said to have been compromised by German spies, and sent to the BND’s headquarters in Pullach, Germany.

Some new research published by the Digital Music News Research Group has revealed some interesting changes in the use of peer-to-peer file-sharing applications.

If my maths is right (and it probably isn’t), Trojan horses will be 3193 years old tomorrow.

Yes, according to military historians the city of Troy fell to the Greeks on April 24, 1184 BC, following a ten year siege.

BBC One has now broadcast the TV documentary we told you about yesterday examining the problem of identity fraud.

If you have visited the website of anti-virus company Trend Micro this week there is a chance that your computer has been exposed to malware.

According to reports in the Japanese media, a number of webpages on the firm’s Japanese and English-language website were altered by hackers on Sunday 9 March, who used a malicious iFrame exploit to deliver a Trojan horse onto surfers’ computers.

A notorious virus-writing gang has announced that it has ceased its operations.

It’s February 29th. If you’re a single man that means you’re living in mortal fear that your girlfriend will realise that you have been ignoring her hints for the last 4 years, take advantage of the Leap Year, and propose marriage to you.

Michael Barrett, PayPal’s chief information security officer, is reported in the press today as recommending that surfers use Internet Explorer, Firefox or even Opera in preference to Apple’s web browser, Safari.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have been hitting the headlines more than normal in the last week following a number of high profile news stories.

An online petition to Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been set up to call for the creation of a central e-crime police unit, as proposed by the Metropolitan Police and the Association of Chief Police Officers. The petition is growing in momentum, and signatories include members of the House of Lords Committee on Personal Internet Safety.

Last week the newspapers were full of stories about the teenager arrested in New Zealand, accused of heading up an international hacking ring that broke into millions of computers around the world. The arrest came about following the successful co-operation between the FBI and the crime-fighting authorities in New Zealand and The Netherlands.

It’s appalling. The loss of millions of people’s personal information by the HMRC shakes the trust that people need to have with government organizations to its foundations. Worryingly, new research conducted by Sophos has found that 58% of those polled believe the Government’s data loss was “inevitable”. Yes, we know that to to err is human, but to really screw things up it seems you need a Government department.

This week is Get Safe Online awareness week in the UK, and the campaign has scheduled a series of events up and down the country to raise the public’s knowledge of internet security risks .

You probably don’t need too great a memory to remember the Melissa virus.

But what many people don’t remember is that David L Smith, the author of Melissa, named his virus after an exotic dancer he encountered in Miami, Florida. And guess what? Melissa is back!