Matthew Hines

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. […]

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 […]