A new study conducted by Cardiff University provides some insights about the power of social media that are both surprising and completely expected in the same moment.

The study focused on Twitter and using tweets to help identify dangerous situations, with the goal being to learn if social media trends could be used to identify potentially dangerous developing situations faster than police reports, which have been the longstanding standard.

It turns out that the answer is a resounding yes.

The researchers combined a dataset of 1.6 million tweets from the London riots in 2011 with a machine learning algorithm which automatically scans Twitter for potential threats. The three primary variables taken into account were street name, time of tweet and key words, which vary from one situation to the next, depending on what someone is looking for.

The results from the Cardiff research were confirmation that data drawn from Twitter can predict violent threats up to an hour faster than conventional methods that rely on police reports and official data sources.

The fact that social media is so much faster is a bit surprising. On the other hand, there are some companies in business today selling their ability to do that very thing, which is what makes the results less of a surprise and more of a confirmation. After all, if these companies weren’t successful at making predictions using something close to real time social media data mining, then they wouldn’t still be in business.

The lesson to be learned here is simple. We’re getting increasingly adept at handling very large datasets, and that data can be mined in real time (or close to real time) to produce actionable intelligence.

The same algorithm that can be used to predict violent outbursts in a large city can be tweaked for use by businesses to provide a variety of intelligence. If it’s not something you’ve considered before, now is the time to factor it into your thinking.

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There’s a new piece of malware to worry about called “Neutrino,” and it represents an especially troubling development. It’s a fork of an older, well-developed banking Trojan called “Zeus,” and its designers have gone to great lengths to make sure that it remains undetected for as long as possible so it has more time to do its work. Unlike its parent, this one is designed to infect Point-Of-Sale (POS) systems where it harvests credit card data to send back to its controller.

One of the main things that makes Neutrino so difficult to spot is that once it infects a target system, it goes into an extended hibernation, so as to throw antivirus software and other security scans off its scent. After its specified hibernation period ends, it wakes up and contacts its Command and Control server, run by the software’s controller.

Among other things, Neutrino can:

• Make screenshots
• Search processes by name
• Search files by name on any infected host and send them back to the C&C Server
• Download and execute files sent from the C&C Server, either to spread the infection, or to cause damage to the system
• Change register branches

To steal credit card information, it searches the memory pages and collects information for the strings “Track1” and “Track2” which contain the information normally held by the magnetic stripe on the credit cards run through the system.

Once it has this data, it’s a simple matter to send it back to the C&C Server at whatever interval the hacker has specified.

According to researchers at Kaspersky Labs, for the moment, the largest concentration of infections is in Russia and Kazakhstan, but that could change in the blink of an eye.

At present, companies that sell antivirus software are working to update their databases to detect this latest threat, but of course, that’s an uphill battle. The hackers will merely create a new, undetectable variant, and the cycle will continue. For now, just be advised that there’s yet another threat to worry about, and stay on your guard.

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Researchers from McAfee’s mobile division have discovered a strain of ransomware called “LeakerLocker” on two apps that slipped through Google’s various checks and made their way onto the Google Play Store.

The apps in question were “Booster and Cleaner Pro,” which was billed as an app designed to boost memory on your smartphone, and “Wallpapers Blur HD” which is a wallpaper management app. When Google was informed of the issue, they promptly removed both apps, but there are a few points of interest here.

Firstly, both apps were part of a rewards program, which actually pays users a small sum to install them on their devices. This methodology is becoming increasingly common and has been used in the past to get users to install harmful apps on their devices.

Secondly, the researchers who found the app say that it’s not a scam. What this means is that it doesn’t rely on underhanded tactics in order to install itself, but rather, it relies exclusively on permissions freely granted by the user.

Before Google pulled the plug on these two, the cleaner app was installed between 5k and 10k times, and the wallpaper app was installed between 1k and 5k times. If either of those names sound familiar to you, and you’ve installed, but not yet run the apps, delete them immediately to avoid any potential troubles. If you don’t, you’ll soon find that you can’t get into your phone.

Note that this strain of ransomware doesn’t encrypt your files, but locks your screen and thus makes all your files inaccessible. At that point, your only options are to pay the fee or restore from your most recent backup, neither of which are great options.

While Google has a generally good reputation and a proven ability to stop malicious apps before they ever make it to the play store, as this latest incident underscores, the company isn’t perfect. You can’t ever afford to completely let down your guard.

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