Lost+Found: Plain text spooks, AV charts and crypto answers

Too small for news, but too good to lose, Lost+Found is a compilation of the other stories that have been on The H's radar over the last seven days: AV popularity, Crypto answers, plain text spooks, encrypted iOS chat and asking Mozilla's security anything.

• The AV-Comparatives virus lab has surveyed around 5000 users for its IT Security Survey 2013. One of the results shows an interesting split between Europe and the US over anti-malware vendors – In Europe, Avast and Kaspersky are most popular while in the US, Microsoft and Symantec top the charts.

• The self appointed cryptoheads at WTF Crypto will answer your cryptography questions and they are not people who beat around the bush – the answers are short and sharp.

• Not storing passwords in clear text is a message that apparently has yet to be taken up by GCHQ, the UK signals intelligence agency. A blogger noticed that the "Forgot Password" link on the official careers page sent an email with the password in plain text. While the careers site is now "down for essential maintenance" there's no word as to whether the perpetrators of the site have been reported to the "Plain Text Offenders".

• Christine Corbett Moran has started work on porting Moxie Marlinspikes' crypto messenger app TextSecure to iOS and has put a prototype on GitHub.

• Obama did it, Bill Gates did it and so did Arnold Schwarzenegger – now it's the turn of Mozilla's security team to do an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit where they are fielding questions. There's already over 300 comments in the thread, many of them worth reading.

(djwm)