Matthew Hines

The collateral financial damage incurred by online phishing attacks–such as the impact that the fraud has on hijacked brands–continues to spiral upward, according to a new research report issued by security monitoring specialist Cyveillance. While exact financial projections remain hard to nail down because so many of the costs related to the phishing involve soft […]

As the economy slumps and the holiday season arrives malware schemers are weaving together various timely social trends to target new attacks at end users. In one such new iteration of the activity, researchers at PandaLabs have isolated a P2P worm virus making the rounds in a campaign that marries the time-honored holiday celebration angle […]

It’s that most wonderful time of the year, when security researchers begin making their (typically dire) predictions for the calendar that lies immediately ahead of us. And, like most other market-oriented prognostications being offered up these days, experts are projecting that the cyber-security landscape is largely expected to become only more discouraging in the coming […]

Bit9 has issued an interesting piece of research that builds on the report produced by Secunia earlier this week which that found a mere 2 percent of all PCs are fully patched with the latest relevant security updates for all of their applications. The security vendor is an applications white-listing specialist, so, it spends a […]

Even as organizations invest millions of dollars in security mechanisms meant to defend them against potential threats, business initiatives such as outsourcing, combined with the seemingly unstoppable onslaught of cyber-crime, will continue make it hard to prevent attacks targeting electronic data in the coming year, according to a new research report. Based on the “Security […]

Not long after security researchers and at least one journalist successfully lobbied for shady hosting provider McColo to be taken offline by its own hosts several weeks ago, and worldwide spam levels nearly immediately dipped by as much as 70 percent, security industry pundits began predicting that it wouldn’t be long before spammers and botnet […]

Security researchers at Secunia published an eye-opening report in a blog post today, saying in the note that based on their observations, less than 2 percent of all active Windows PCs are fully patched against known security vulnerabilities. Cripes! We’ve been hearing for years that being fully patched is fairly unrealistic, but less than 2 […]

The phony AV malware model continues to find popularity among attackers, as demonstrated by Sophos in a recent report tracking the twists and turns of one particular breed of the so-called “scareware” social engineering technique, through which distributors of the programs convince end users to download malicious files disguised as security applications that actually include […]

Significant advancement in the complexity of spam, malware and botnet attacks was the key trend tracked by researchers at MessageLabs during 2008, according to the company’s Annual Security Report. Experts at the messaging security specialist, which was recently acquired by industry giant Symantec, contend that calendar 2008 was a “pivotal” year for development among cyber-criminals […]

UTM specialist Fortinet is reporting that online threats and spam dropped noticeably during the month of November, continuing their downward trend since such activity peaked for the calendar year during September. According to the vendor’s Nov. Threatscape Report, the slowdown in attacks and unsolicited e-mail will likely reverse its course during the month of December, […]

Malware-building toolkits have seen a dramatic rise in popularity over the last few years, as some of the smartest bad guys have decided to distance themselves from the act of carrying out attacks on their own and moved into creating products that allow others to do so in an automated fashion. As a result, legions […]

While legitimate financial markets may be struggling to maintain any sense of momentum, underground cybercrime networks are thriving and becoming more self-dependent, a new report from security giant Symantec maintains. Based on its assessment of Web servers used by cybercriminals to advertise and sell-off stolen data, the underground is not slowing down in parallel to […]