When Panda Security found malware on a brand new Android-based Vodafone HTC Magic earlier this month, Vodafone said it was an "isolated local incident." Now, a second phone has been found harboring malware, including a program that turns infected machines into zombies as part of the Mariposa credit card and bank log-in-stealing botnet, according to Spain-based PandaLabs.

After hearing about PandaLabs' discovery, an employee at another Spanish security company, S21Sec, checked his recently-acquired HTC Magic and found the Mariposa malware lurking on it, according to a PandaLabs blog post on Wednesday.

Plenty of people download music from the internet every day, but illegal downloading has a huge economic impact and could put more than one million people out of work by 2015, experts say.

A study into internet piracy by a Paris-based consultancy published on Wednesday showed that 1.2 million jobs in the European Union could be lost over the next five years if more is not done to clamp down on illegal downloading.

The study by TERA Consultants for the International Chamber of Commerce focused on piracy in Europe's music, film, television and software industries.

Those industries generated 860 billion euros (NZ$1.6 trillion) and employed 14.4 million people in 2008. But in the same year, 10 billion euros and 186,000 jobs were lost to piracy, the study found.

U.S. regulators are moving to freeze the assets and trading accounts of a Russian accused of hacking into personal online portfolios and manipulating the price of dozens of stocks listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market and New York Stock Exchange.

A New York federal judge on Tuesday sided with the Securities and Exchange Commission and froze the assets of Broco Investments, believed to be a one-trader operation based in St. Petersburg, Russia. The SEC said Broco capitalized by artificially moving prices of more 38 thinly traded securities — enabling Broco to profit from up-or-down price swings.

“These transactions have created the appearance of legitimate trading activity and have artificially affected the prices of at least 38 issuers,” (.pdf)  the Securities and Exchange Commission said in court filing.

More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.

Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots.

“We initially dismissed it as mechanical failure,” says Texas Auto Center manager Martin Garcia. “We started having a rash of up to a hundred customers at one time complaining. Some customers complained of the horns going off in the middle of the night. The only option they had was to remove the battery.”

Italian police have used social networking site Facebook to track down and capture one of the country's most-wanted fugitive mafia suspects.

Pasquale Manfredi, accused of being one of the top figures in the 'Ndrangheta mafia, was found in Calabria.

The 33-year-old, who faces charges of murder, mafia association and drugs trafficking, was traced via his network of Facebook contacts. Reports suggest he called himself Scarface, after the film character.

According to Italian newspaper La Repubblica, he was arrested as he tried to escape from the roof of the apartment complex near the southern city of Crotone.

Believed to lead the 'Ndrangheta in the southern town, Pasquale Manfredi is also accused of possessing illegal armaments, including heavy weapons.

Security  vendor Trusteer's latest product will allow banks to remotely investigate their customers' computers if it is suspected the PC has been hacked. The service, called Flashlight, is designed to enable banks' security experts to quickly identify what types of malicious software programs customers are encountering in order to build better defenses, said Mickey Boodaei, Trusteer's CEO.

The newest version of Zeus, a do-it-yourself crimeware kit responsible for millions of dollars in losses by consumers and businesses, comes with anti-piracy provisions similar to those used by Microsoft's Windows, a researcher said today. And that's a good thing.

Like Windows, Zeus 1.3 ties itself to a specific computer using a key code based in part on the machine's hardware configuration, said Kevin Stevens, a security researcher with Atlanta-based SecureWorks, and a co-author of a report on Zeus published last week. "It's just like a Windows license," said Stevens as he explained how the key code is generated.

Microsoft confirmed today that a security update for its Excel spreadsheet had turned English text in an important Windows tool into Chinese.

US losses to online crime almost doubled during 2009, reveals a report.

Losses totalled $560m (£371m) in 2009, up from $265m (£176m) in 2008, showed the annual report by the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Complaints about online fraud grew 22% during 2009 and the IC3 received more than 336,655 reports of high-tech crime incidents from victims.

Google is changing the way it handles the unique identifier that accompanies each installation of its Chrome browser.

As noticed by H-Online, a Google white paper (pdf) says the company will now delete the unique ID after the browser updates itself for the first time.