Matthew Hines

It’s no secret that legitimate sites infected with malware or redirections to malware-laden copycat URLs have become one of the biggest problems in the world of cyber-security – but the sheer ubiquity of the issue has become pretty staggering. In a report published by filtering specialists Websense earlier this week, based on the company’s sensor […]

Security researchers are reporting that the Conficker worm virus, which preys on a recently reported vulnerability (MS08-067) in the Microsoft Windows server service, is spreading rapidly even as we speak. According to a warning issued today by PandaLabs, some six percent (115,000-plus) of the two million computers that it has scanned for the virus in […]

Ta-da, we’ve got a new record! Yesterday, credit and debit card transaction processing and payroll giant Heartland Payment Systems announced that it had experienced the largest loss of sensitive customer records yet reported publicly, though people have only been keeping records, or reporting breaches, for a few years now. Heartland on Jan. 20 essentially admitted […]

US Airways Flight 1549 pilot Capt. Chesley (Sully) Sullenberger may still be basking in the praise for his astounding Hudson River splash landing last week, but the airline industry is once again seeing its good reputation being abused by malware scammers seeking to lure in would-be targets. In September, security researchers began tracking a run […]

What’s the worst thing that you can do with your computer passwords? Write them down, of course, right? Clearly, that has always been the conventional wisdom in such matters, and it is not a wise move for many obvious reasons, especially if you leave your hand-scrawled list of credentials close by to your desktop, or […]

With President-elect Barack Obama readying to take the oath of office today, IT experts are lining up to offer their advice to the new Commander-In-Chief about what he needs to do to better address issues of cyber-security. In December, a panel of security experts put together by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) […]

Online data security specialists Trusteer have detailed the emergence of a new brand of phishing threat that can be used to hijack secure online user sessions to steal credentials and commit subsequent cyber-fraud. According to the research report, the advanced phishing technique can be used to inject fraudulent information requests into all major browsers and […]

Hot on the heels of Forrester Research’s recent prediction that enterprise businesses will increase security spending from 11.7 percent to 12.6 percent of their overall IT budgets during 2009, gateway filtering specialists Finjan have published results of a survey that highlights even more optimistic growth estimates. While some might point out that Finjan has every […]

While a wide range of malware-delivery methods dot the IT landscape these days, in particular the online domain, the time-honored e-mail borne spam technique remains a popular and apparently useful (based on its pervasiveness) approach – one that will continue to rear its head during 2009, experts maintain. According to researchers at AppRiver, spam-based malware […]

Attackers are still working hard to launch threats that seek to exploit Windows users who remain vulnerable to the Microsoft Windows Server Service RPC Handling Remote Code Execution Vulnerability first reported in late 2008, with Symantec reporting the discovery of a new threat Friday that uses a different propagation pattern than earlier attacks aimed at […]

The sheer volume of malware samples, and the number of newly discovered attacks observed by security researchers during 2008 outpaced even the most aggressive pre-year forecasts and smashed all time records for such activity, according to experts at PandaLabs. The AV maker’s researchers reported in their 2008 Annual Report that they encountered an average of […]

Security researchers are lauding ICANN for making improvements to the process by which it gathers and investigates reports of improper Whois domain registration data. Experts have increasingly highlighted ICANN’s lack of enforcement of its Whois policies as a primary catalyst in allowing shady registrars to support nefarious customers, including malware infection sites and illegal pharmacies. […]