Google has removed 55 apps from its Android Market after tens of thousands of users downloaded applications that were infected by the DroidDream trojan, according to numerous news reports.

An interesting lawsuit has popped up with California’s RPost, a secure email firm, filing a request for an injunction through the Swiss courts over an alleged breach of its technology patents.

Rob Rachwald, Imperva’s security director, says that his company is adding hackers to the old Benjamin Franklin adage that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Hacktivists seem to have learned a lot from the WikiLeaks/Anonymous attacks seen in recent months, as an automated DDoS attack has reportedly frozen access to BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy web portal.

One of the features that Apple may reveal later today when it – as is widely expected, launches the iPad 2 – will be an Android-like pattern lock screen for iOS, the operating system of the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

Complaints lodged with the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC³) totaled 303,809 in 2010, the second highest level in the center’s 10-year history.

Google has blamed a bug in a storage software update for weekend interruptions to its Gmail service in which thousands of users lost e-mail contacts and folders.

The simmering row between security experts and white hat hackers over so-called cracking contests has boiled over, with the organisers of the Pwn2Own competition – which opens on 9 March in Vancouver – defending their role in the industry.

Police in Essex are urging iPhone users to install and register a ‘Find my iPhone’ app on their mobiles, following the successful recovery of a woman’s phone late last month using the software.

A new piece of malware targeting the Mac has been identified by security firm Sophos, as the developer believed to have created a similar trojan for Windows denies having any hand in the Mac-based version.