The Security Mentor

Trend Micro makes a well-respected antivirus program that often shows up as a top performer in independent tests. But it just turned out to have a bug, one of the worst possible kinds, which can completely take over your computer even if you don't have administrative access yourself.

Trend Micro has already fixed the problem and released a fixed version as a free download. If you're running their product, upgrade. Upgrade very soon. Sometimes the bad guys jump on these almost instantly.

Things like this have happened before, to other companies. It seems to be easy to build security products with bugs in them, and certainly they're a high-profile target for people who like to find security bugs.

There's really no way to tell ahead of time what products are likely to be safe: there isn't enough track record yet and there's no feasible way for you to evaluate a product's resistance to all possible attacks.

The best defense against this kind of problem is to keep updating your software on a regular schedule. Most vendors will roll out an upgrade with a fix once they find out about a security issue.