Matthew Hines

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 […]

Security researchers continue to unearth new threats aimed at users of Apple’s Mac OS, illustrating how attackers will always move where the money is and have thus increased their focus on Apple users as the company’s market share climbs. The latest round of Mac attacks discovered by researchers also follows a similar pattern of many […]

As I was watching Symantec security expert Stephen Trilling brief “60 Minutes” correspondent Leslie Stahl about Conficker last night, I had to shake my head in wonder at how high profile the attack has really become. For a single malware campaign to gain such specific notoriety just seems pretty unprecedented, at least since anything that […]

Experts have been saying for years that the influx of online malware attacks and related identity theft would eventually have a negative impact on consumers’ willingness to shop over the Web, but a new research report issued by Javelin Strategy & Research has actually put some numbers behind the theory. In fact, according to the […]

Anyone following the IT security space in recent years has likely observed the futile situation that providers of traditional signature-based AV have found themselves in as a result of server-side polymorphism, or in simpler terms, the ability of malware distributors to launch smaller batches of more customized threats to avoid detection. Even the most stalwart […]

Malware programs designed specifically to steal people’s sensitive data, such a banking Trojans, continue to proliferate widely, according to a recent research report issued by PandaLabs. According to the AV specialist, of the 67 million endpoint devices that it scanned during 2008, more than 10 million had some form of ID-thieving crimeware buried somewhere within. […]

It’s a departure from the stance that most people are taking these days when it comes to issues of social networking and security, but some industry players are pitching the idea that the ever-more-popular communications applications could someday replace more traditional messaging platforms based on their ability to be more centrally protected from attacks. Adam […]