As a new year begins, so does a new threat to your data. A new strain of ransomware (malicious code that demands money to allow you to access your files again) has been spotted in the wild.

We've recently noticed an increase in a particular type of spam referred to as "whaling". This is especially relevant to any high level employees / financial employees in a business, as this trick targets them specifically as the "big fish" (hence "whaling").

It has been reported that Google's Adwords network has been used to try and direct people to malicious websites.

The team behind the Chrome web browser have proposed that the browser will make it much more obvious to the user when a site isn't using an SSL certificate (i.e. it hasn't got https:// at the beginning of the domain name). While just a suggestion at this stage, it is in line with the previous news that Google have already started increasing the ranking of sites that use an SSL certifcate versus those that don't.

Researchers have discovered an altered version of Cryptolocker - a nasty bit of ransomware (i.e. something that demands money to fix the problems it causes) that has been doing the rounds for the past year or so.

The days of Apple users being able to pretty much ignore the security issues that have plagued Windows users for years have been slowly coming to an end. We have seen a definite increase in machine infections ourselves, and searching online suggests that this is not a localised problem.

Last week, a vulnerability (codenamed "Shellshock") was found in a tool called "Bash". This programme is installed by default on millions of machines, especially servers. Bash is a command line interface that is frequently used as the primary point of access to do carry out whatever tasks need performing on these machines.

You may have heard on the news that the National Crime Agency has been warning of some particularly nasty malware that has become a pressing concern. The warnings are about two specific bits of malware. One of these is called "Cryptolocker". This has been doing the rounds for a few months now. This infection encrypts all the files it can find on your PC and network and then charges a ransom to unlock them.