Matthew Hines

New Mobile Trojan Appears

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 […]

Storm Lingers Over Cloud Movement

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 […]

Social Toolbar Ploy Delivers Trojan

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 […]

VIRUT Delivers Polymorphic Punch

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 […]

VIRUX Infector Making Waves

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 […]

Cabal Takes On Conficker’s Domain

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 […]

What to Make of ID Fraud Stats

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 […]

Keeping the Heat on Registrars

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 […]

Vendor Attacks Highlight SQL Injection Run

SQL injection isn’t anything new, but it’s still a big enough issue that hackers have been using the time-honored technique to assail some fairly high-profile sites of late, and lots of them, including that of AV vendor Kaspersky only just today. And, according to IBM, SQL injection attacks leapt by an astonishing 30x over the […]

So Long McColo Lows, Oh Well

Well, here’s what we learned from the McColo experiment that was so cleverly pulled together by Washington Post blogger Brian Krebs and some other smart folks in the name of stemming malware-laden spam e-mail – attacking spam at its source can work, but, seemingly, not for too long. When Krebs et al convinced upstream Internet […]