Every sport has its fans, and the Phoenix Suns basketball team is finding that use of social networking has become one of the main ways to keep in touch with its fan base -- though it can get dicey when basketball fans across the NBA go a little wild before big games.

IBM today issued its sixth annual look at what Big Blue thinks will be the five biggest technologies for the next five years. In past prediction packages the company has had some success in predicting the future of telemedicine and nanotechnology.

Every year, IBM picks five technologies that it predicts are going to change our lives in the next five years. This year's crop of life changers includes efficient capture of renewable energy, proliferation of biometric identification to authenticate your identity, control of machines with your mind, elimination of the digital divide and the end of spam.

I’m dating myself, but I remember when holiday shopping involved pouring through ads in the Sunday paper, placing actual phone calls from tethered land lines to research product stock and availability, and actually driving places to pick things up. Now, holiday shoppers can do all of that from a smartphone or tablet in a few seconds, but there are some security pitfalls to be aware of.

There's been a flurry of coverage of mobile malware over the past few days, including two separate reports declaring both 2011 and 2012 "the year of mobile malware".

All the major Web-based email services have junk mail folders and spam filters that strain out obvious offenders. Categorizing messages and filtering out those you don’t want may help, but limits control. It would be nice just to tell your email program which messages you want to receive and when--and dump the rest. Windows Live Hotmail may be coming a step closer to that, with changes announced this week.

Just when you were starting to get ahead of the curve when it comes to locking down the network and protecting PCs, everything went mobile. Not just laptops--but tablets, and smartphones that run unique operating systems and applications on completely different hardware. To help you combat the dramatic rise in mobile security threats, McAfee has developed Enterprise Mobility Management.

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.

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.

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.

An overwhelming majority of Web sites promoted through spam are hosted in China at service providers that many times choose to ignore complaints and allow illegal activity, according to research from the University of Alabama.

As mobile users are more frequently pestered by SMS spam, one security vendor is applying its experience in stopping e-mail spam for mobile networks.

Obama's appointment of Vivek Kundra marks an important first step for rectifying the nation's concerns about IT.

What the average guy might call a con is known in the security world as social engineering. Social engineering is the criminal art of scamming a person into doing something or divulging sensitive information. These days, there are thousands of ways for con artists to pull off their tricks (See: Social Engineering: Eight Common Tactics). Here we look at some of the most common lines these people are using to fool their victims..