'High School Musical' malware

This is a computer-security problem more likely to affect families with kids and tweens - especially young file-sharers (high school students are a bit old for "High School Musical"). If fans of Disney's High School Musical series uses P2P networks such as eMule or eDonkey, they need to be especially alert, CNET reports. It cites a report from Panda Security that warns of Trojan software called VB.ADQ or Agent.KGR, as well as "the adware Koolbar, that's circulating around those file-sharing networks. Pay attention to the file extension before you download any file that looks like a tune or clip from the series. "Many of the malicious files have the extension '.exe'," which is "rarely the case with a legitimate music or video file," CNET reports.

New Facebook worm

Tell Facebook users at your house to be very alert when social-network friends seem to say they've just got to check out this or that video. That scenario happens all the time - which is why it's used by social-engineering hackers to infect social networkers' computers. Where the new worm comes in is an extra step for which users need to be on the alert. The way it works is, they get a link supposedly to a video, CNET reports. That takes them to a Google page where they read that, in order to view the video, they need to click to download some code or an app. Clicking on that link installs Trojan software. The link on that page, however, isn't really a Google link. CNET explains why and how Google pages are being used. Though the problem will probably be fixed by both Google and Facebook shortly, this is a good illustration of why social networkers should never blindly click around - especially when there's a cool video in the offing.