April Fools' Day rolled around again, and F-Secure celebrated by including a new browser protection feature that warns its customers whenever they click on a Rickroll link, saving thousands of people from ever hearing the UK pop star again. Meanwhile, IT security firm Sophos considered publishing romantic fiction as a means of distracting cyber criminals.

Talking of April fools, scammers were hoping to pick up a few, as they do every year, by spoofing emails from the US Internal Revenue Service. McAfee saw scams centering around tax returns increasing as we approach tax D-Day.

Breaches and compromises were thick on the ground this week. 5450 patients' personal and medical details were exposed after two laptops were stolen from Walnut Creek-based hospital system John Muir Health. Ex-FDIC employee Merikay Wootton was found guilty of a data leak while she was working at a bank in Kansas that had been taken over by the regulator. The former loan officer, who was hired as an employee by the FDIC's division of resolutions and receiverships, disclosed confidential information including the identity and income of customers with loans. And according to a story in the Washington Post, the U.S. Navy took 17 months to tell employees at its Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center that their Social Security numbers had been accidentally released. The records of 128 employees were sent to three others whose security access had been suspended, according to the paper.

Amid the controversy over Apple's lack of support for Adobe Flash in the iPad, Google has announced plans to build the multimedia Web client technology natively into its Chrome browser, and will update it automatically.