Accounting for over one billion smartphone sales last year, Android is by far the most common operating system. It’s no surprise then that the OS is a prime target for malware and compromised security. While Google is very active in making Android safer, there are also a range of third party apps available. Read on to find out how to improve your security.

There's already a nice selection of free antivirus programs available for the discerning user, but it's hard to say no to a new entry. Sophos already has a free product available on OS X and it's recently dipped its toes into Windows' waters.

The resurgence in Office macro viruses shows no sign of slowing up. According to Sophos, attacks using Office's built-in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) now account for more than a quarter of all document-based attacks.

Macro viruses -- utilising Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to execute code inside Office apps like Word and Excel -- were the most visible form of malware at one point, but improved security in Office meant their prevalence has dropped dramatically in recent years. Now, however, it seems they're on the prowl again.

Mobile device management is a relatively crowded market, but several of the current solutions focus largely on Android and iOS. Sophos has updated its Mobile Control software to version 3.5, adding the ability to control Windows Phone 8 devices as well.

Apple's latest security update for Mac OS X includes a series of patches to Quicktime designed to stop the movie playback software from being exploited to launch a malicious attack. How do you turn a non-executable movie into dangerous executable code?

We're huge fans of the flexibility of Windows' PowerShell scripting language, but we've never contemplated using it to write malware. That hasn't stopped one group of enterprising criminals building PowerShell-based ransomware aimed at Russian computer users, but fortunately it turns out PowerShell can also be used to remedy the issue.

Ransomware -- software which hijacks your computer and demands financial payment to return access to your data -- is an increasingly lucrative criminal activity. A new white paper from Sophos highlights how ransomware operates, and offers some clues on how to stop it.

Business security software developer Sophos is signing up testers for its new Cloud Platform security suite, which shifts Sophos' existing security software systems into a cloud environment, letting you deploy, manage and report via an online interface. The software beta hasn't rolled out yet, but is due for release in "early 2013".