Matthew Hines

Sunbelt Software has released its monthly data dump that charts the most commonly observed malware and spyware threats, and, as has been the case for a good while, Trojan attacks continued to lead the way across the Top Ten rankings during Dec. 2008. From the Virtumonde Trojan, which accounted for almost 5 percent of the […]

As we’ve noted regularly in recent days, social networking sites are seeing a significant increase in attacks aimed at their users, primarily those seeking to lure people to fake log-in pages made to resemble the sites, through which the bad guys attempt to phish legitimate credentials to carry out future campaigns. After grabbing credentials, attackers […]

Just like almost every other social networking site, the all-business world of LinkedIn is apparently becoming an increasingly popular platform for attackers looking to dupe unsuspecting end users into swallowing their bait and heading off to their malware-infected URLs. Specifically, McAfee researchers said in a blog post that they have recently observed a noticeable uptick […]

An interesting little situation has cropped up across the pond in the UK, where it became public news late last week that new legislation makes it permissible for law enforcement types to use spyware to look-in on the citizenry without first obtaining a court-ordered mandate to do so. According to the BBC, the law was […]

Some things change with the passage of the New Year, and some do not. When it comes to the problem of Web-based malware, it would seem that more organizations than ever before are aware of, and focused on addressing the issue – but clearly many people still have no idea what they should do, specifically […]

If one thing is sure not to change in 2009, it’s the fact that attackers will likely be using more social engineering methods than ever before – and more socially-driven technologies than ever before – to find their prey. Why is this fact so certain? Well, that’s easy, because, even if someone can technically exploit […]

After several years of experts commenting publicly that the mobile malware epidemic predicted by some security vendors a few years back had likely been far overstated, more and more researchers are now getting back on the bandwagon. I’m left wondering to what extent the problem is real today, or if it is merely something we […]

Like the sound of a mosquito thwacking into a bug light on a steamy mid-summer’s night – about the opposite imagery of what many of us are experiencing right now as we sit buried under a blanket of winter snow – the arrival of last week’s emergency IE patch touched off a new wave of […]

When Washington Post blogger Brian Krebs and some of his friends forced larger ISPs to cut off shady hosting provider McColo in early November, some experts estimated that worldwide spam rates dipped by as much as 75 percent as several major e-mail-spewing botnets had their virtual heads cut off. Well, I hope you enjoyed the […]

Well, one of the positive things that you can say about spammers is this… they always find a new way to get their message across. Having seemingly exhausted every manner of injecting their unsolicited marketing content into e-mail subject lines and message bodies as they’ve adjusted to anti-spam filters spammers are now turning to e-mail […]

Security researcher Chris Boyd, aka “Paperghost” is showing off a newly discovered variation on the fake AV theme that was recently encountered in the wild. In a new twist on the phony AV/clean-up utility scam, this latest version threatens to shut down an end user’s computer if they fail to click on a flashing warning […]

The security community has been abuzz with the news of Microsoft’s newly released IE memory corruption vulnerability over the last several days, and according to researchers at Symantec, there’s good reason for everyone to be concerned. Beyond any controversy regarding the timing of Microsoft’s related advisory, Symantec has been tracking the arrival of exploits designed […]