Rob Waugh

The 2014 threat trends report from ESET's global network of cybersecurity experts centers on three key trends, the first and foremost being digital privacy, the others being threats to mobile devices, and new, hi-tech malware targeting PCs and other devices in the home.

A Firefox add-on has turned 12,500 users of the browser into a botnet which scours every page visited by infected users for vulnerabilities. The ‘Advanced Power’ add-on ensnared 12,500 PCs - and found 1,800 vulnerable websites for its unknown creators.

A new ‘Smart ID’ card, BluStor, aims to “eliminate hacking and identity theft” - using a combination of voiceprints, fingerprints and iris readings and connecting to mobile devices via Bluetooth, so an app can confirm a user’s ID instantly.

The assault by cybercriminals against big businesses continued this year -78% were attacked by outsiders, according to a report by Price Waterhouse Cooper. But small businesses - those with less than 50 employees - are rapidly becoming a target.

An international plot which would have turned huge numbers of PCs into “bricks” by using deeply buried malware was foiled by the NSA, according to an interview given to CBS by NSA director Keith Alexander. The attack could have "taken down the U.S. economy", an NSA official claimed.

Your next PC password could be President Bill Clinton kissing a fish - and that disturbing mental image, and similar surreal “story images” could be the key to creating strong passwords across multiple accounts, according to Carnegie Mellon researchers.

All of the top 100 apps on Google's Play store have been hacked, and hackers now specifically target financial apps, such as those used by banks - with 53% of Android banking apps having been cracked, according to a report by Arxan.

Fingerprint identification systems could sweep through the world faster than most have predicted, according to Ericcsson, the world’s largest cellphone network maker - based on opinion polls of 100,000 smartphone users around the world.

This week, UK IT worker and social engineering blogger Dale Pearson was targeted - with eight phone calls from a company claiming there was a fault on his PC - but Pearson had both the time and the equipment to fight back.