iOS 9 isn't even out yet, but the OS has already been successfully jailbroken. This means you'll be able to unshackle the hardware restrictions from your iPhone 6S or 6S Plus as soon as you pull it out of the box. While there are certainly benefits to jailbreaking your iOS device, it also opens up a range of significant threats. If you're thinking of going down this route, be sure to read this first...

The concept of malware can be pretty difficult for children to get their heads around (especially if their parents happen to be Luddites.) Here are some simple tactics from BitDefender's Andrei Taflan that should lead to safer surfing.

Jobs in IT can pay fairly well, but the sad reality is that if you have even rudimentary coding skills, there might be a better short-term payoff in scamming people.

Bogdan "Bob" Botezatu is a BitDefender senior e-threat analyst who regularly works the graveyard shift at the security firm's Romanian headquarters. While the world sleeps, Bob keeps tabs on emerging threats and developments in the areas of mobile- and social network-based malware.

Brief news items of note for Lifehacker readers including: Clueful security app comes to Android, get a Nexus 7 tablet for $206, extreme stuntman drives snow mobile off cliff and films it.

Bitdefender is preparing to launch Clueful in the Google Play Store; the same privacy protection app that was forcibly removed from the Apple App Store last year. We quizzed Bitdefender's leading security bods about what the new app offers Android users.

A new study from online security firm Bitdefender has revealed thousands of popular Androud apps are being used by unscrupulous advertisers to collect and upload user information to third party servers. Some apps were even found to access users' browsing history and photos.

We wrote about BitDefender's iOS privacy monitoring app Clueful when it launched last May, but the app only survived two months before Apple removed it from the App Store. Now Clueful has returned as a webapp.

Parents worry about what their kids get up to online, but are they guilty of double standards? A study of 1600 parents by BitDefender suggests that parents are twice as likely to monitor the Facebook use of teenage boys than girls.

Apple really doesn't like anyone else remind people that there can be privacy and security problems on the iTunes App Store. It has removed BitDefender's Clueful app -- which highlights potential security and privacy violations in other apps -- from the store.

Apple won't approve iOS anti-virus apps, but that doesn't mean there aren't security issues for the platform that can be addressed. BitDefender's Clueful analyses the impact of other apps you have installed on your iPhone or apps you're considering installing, including what data they share, whether they use excessive battery life and how they store data.

It's always the way of digital things: as soon as a technology becomes successful, scammers and criminals line up to exploit it. Current hot development areas for the con artists? Fake free Mac anti-virus solutions and scams aimed at the growing audience on Pinterest.

I'm willing to bet that you don't bother running any kind of security check before plugging a USB drive into your computer. That could be a mistake: research by BitDefender suggests that infections from software which automatically launches when you connect a USB drive are up significantly.

We've already highlighted a couple of tools which you can use to detect the Carrier IQ software that's causing such controversy on Android and iOS phones. Security software developer BitDefender has now also released a detection tool which can tell you if the intrusive code is present on your device.