Matthew Hines

We’ve been threatening to punish organizations that mishandle sensitive electronic data and allow attackers to infiltrate their systems to steal consumer records for years, but here’s an interesting new idea – how about rewarding those companies who go above and beyond the norm in doing a good job with data security – with tax breaks? […]

Some might say it’s slightly self-serving for a company that sells anti-botnet technology to blame the nefarious zombie networks of infected PCs for a lion’s share of today’s cyber-attacks, but despite any reservations you might harbor to that end, it’s clear in chatting with the folks from Damballa that the effect of today’s sprawling worldwide […]

It’s a gross oversimplification of an utterly staggering technical and social challenge, and he knows it as well as anyone, but it’s hard to argue with PCI Security Standards Council General Manager Bob Russo’s assertion that when it comes to improving electronic data security and related matters of individual privacy, “something is much better than […]

A new research report delving further into the current epidemic of online SQL injection attacks maintains that over a half million sites were victimized by the threats during 2008 alone. According to the Web Hacking Incidents Database (WHID) 2008 Annual Report issued by security appliance maker Breach Security on Tuesday, SQL threats that dropped malware […]

Researchers at F-Secure have uncovered a new Trojan threat aimed at users of Symbian smart phones. And while a majority of the mobile device attacks discovered by the company (and others) over the years have fallen into the same category – malware variants written specifically to assail the Symbian OS, which is not widely used […]

Everyone is talking about the race toward cloud-based computing, but apparently, most organizations aren’t rushing to embrace the emerging Web-based infrastructure as quickly as they might – based at least in part on concerns over security. A new study into cloud computing adoption trends published by enterprise IT consultants Avanade and conducted by pollsters at […]

Researchers at security giant McAfee have uncovered a new threat that hides alongside a legitimate social networking toolbar application and delivers a backdoor Trojan attack as part of its payload. According to a blog post filed on the company’s AVERT team site by researcher Dennis Elser on Tuesday, the newly discovered attack targets users of […]

On the heels of last week’s report on VIRUX, researchers have directed their interests back at the VIRUT file infection family that begat the other strain of malware attack. As experts at Symantec highlighted in a blog on Monday, polymorphic file infectors like VIRUT have been around for almost two decades now (1990 is almost […]

Malware researchers are warning of a complex new set of file infection attacks that are spreading their way around the globe and appear to bear fairly complex capabilities, including the ability to circumvent Microsoft’s Windows Firewall security software. Dubbed VIRUX by researchers at TrendLabs, experts with the company said they have received a series of […]

Conficker (aka Downadup) has turned out to be an annoyingly persistent pest, worming its way around actively for almost four months now. In a high-profile effort to stem the worm’s continued re-spawning, Microsoft, Symantec and a crew of partners including ICANN, VeriSign, Neustar, Public Internet Registry, F-Secure, AOL, Support Intelligence and Arbor Networks unveiled a […]

So everybody focused on the fact that Javelin Research reported that women were more likely to become victims of ID theft-based fraud, but there are some other interesting numbers in the research results. A lot of people have been speculating over the last six months or so that cybercrime would be increasing based on the […]

With all the negativity to reflect upon in the world of IT security these days, there has been a pretty cool trend emerging over the last year or two as grassroots researchers have experienced greater success in calling out online miscreants in public and then seeing those organizations snap-to or go under. Witness the successful […]