Matthew Hines

Everybody knows that many of today’s compromised devices result from end user visits to infected Web sites or downloads of unapproved applications, however, few organizations are taking the time to carefully monitor or police people’s online hygiene. While many companies are beginning to look at applications white-listing technologies, and organizations in heavily-regulated industries such as […]

The Verizon Business Data Breach (.pdf) that was published today seems to have raised a few eyebrows. But mostly, the results of the study, while extremely valid and helpful in framing issues of cyber-crime, only tell us something we already know – organized criminals, mostly from Eastern Europe, are stealing veritable tons of online banking […]

As if it should be at all surprising, word from Gartner – phishing is ubiquitous, to the extent that attackers are aiming their campaigns at stealing smaller amounts of money from more people, a sure sign that competition in the field, and legitimate organizations’ response efforts to such fraud are increasingly shaping the makeup of […]

A security team’s biggest fear is an attack carried out by a knowledgeable insider, and with the economy driving job cuts within many organizations, those worries are being realized in the form of discharged workers who retain access to their former employers’ IT systems, according to a new survey. With jobs walking out the door, […]

As organizations deal with the confluence of shrinking IT budgets and scaling malware threats, they’re becoming even more dependent on endpoint security providers and the vendors’ ability to integrate important management features into their products, according Steve Munford, CEO of Sophos, one of the fastest growing companies in the space. Industry analysts may be pushing […]

The Ghostnet botnet attack that has successfully exploited computer systems within government networks around the globe is being driven in part by an easy-to-use malware authoring toolkit that allows for simple and rapid propagation, researchers contend. Ghostnet, which was discovered by a group of college researchers in Canada and first reported last week, has purportedly […]

It seems like everyone is putting out their spam stats this week… It was inevitable that mass mailers would begin using more localized information to target their spam at end users, if you think about it they’ve already been doing that for a long time, depending on what language the messages display when they arrive […]

An interesting bird this Conficker. A botnet, a worm, a USB infection… a media darling and technological masterpiece, yet, a wraith whose true intentions have yet to have been laid bare. An April Fools’ Day joke punch line undelivered. It’s been a real soap opera, right? Everyone in the security community is already completely burned […]

After a short cooling-off period driven by the highly publicized shutdown of shady hosting provider McColo, spam levels rose back to the same, if not higher levels than they had achieved before the incident, according to researchers with Google’s Postini division. By the second half of March, seven-day average spam volume was at the same […]

So, tomorrow we find out if Conficker is a big joke, a Y2K-type predicament, or a really big deal. Or so some people say… But it would seem that the elder statesmen of the industry have done their homework, and been around the block enough times, to see the threat for what most experienced researchers […]

New research indicates that the number of Web sites spreading malicious programs tripled in the last month alone, with the volumes of spam attacks aimed at directing users to the malware sites swelling in concert with the tainted URLs. According to the March Intelligence Report issued by Symantec’s MessageLabs division on Tuesday, malware-oriented spam reached […]

Security researchers are highlighting a more powerful breed of attack that is specifically targeting users of the open source Mozilla Firefox web browser. Long touted for its improved security over rival browsers including Microsoft IE, Firefox has been mined for dozens of vulnerabilities over the last few years, but the application hasn’t ever faced the […]