Matthew Hines

As the November presidential election approaches, it would seem that as many questions linger today regarding the security of the nation’s electronic voting systems as there were four years ago. After the hanging chad debacle of the 2000 presidential run-off many states moved to update their outdated voting machines and replace them with new ATM-like […]

The Georgia Tech Information Security Center hosted its annual summit on emerging security threats Oct. 15 and published its annual attack forecast report. According to the research, the electronic domain will see greater amounts of malware, botnets, attacks on VOIP systems and cyber-warfare in the coming year. The report is the result of research projects […]

It seems like it’s a bit early to make such assumptions, but Panda Security’s PandaLabs is already on the record as predicting that the current economic instability in world markets will only serve to increase the cyber-crime epidemic. Specifically, and as in many other recent research reports, PandaLabs is pointing to the exponential increase in […]

It’s not a hugely new development, as spammers have long sought to tie their work to legitimate topics and properties, but researchers have noted that the schemers are increasingly using the names, likenesses and even the online infrastructure of genuine organizations to defeat ISP filtering tools. As highlighted in Commtouch Software‘s third-quarter 2008 E-Mail Threats […]

Security software maker Secunia has published an interesting new piece of research that pits a dozen well-known AV and Internet security packages against live exploit testing to see how they fare in detecting the threats. Based on the business proposition of the software company that I work for in my day job, I’ll avoid any […]

Security researchers are warning of a new malware campaign through which Trojan threats are being advertised under the guise of Verizon MMS messages. As first reported by Webroot, Verizon’s popularity and broad customer base are being leveraged by attackers to direct the infected messages to people who subscribe to its services or communicate regularly with […]

Malware attacks disguised as legitimate security applications or patch/vulnerability advisories continue to proliferate rapidly, further establishing the mainstream’s heightened sensitivity to online threats as a seemingly viable threat model. The fake anti-virus angle first appeared several years ago, but according to recent reports, anti-malware vendors are seeing security-themed threats take over an increasingly large piece […]

Spending the bulk of my days in vendor land, I try to avoid vendor-related coverage for the most part to avoid any conflicts of interest, and, you know, because I spent so many years writing up so many dang vendor pitches. However, I do think it is worth noting in these parts when a new(ish) […]

Following on news from the Identity Theft Resource Center that data breaches have reached an all time high over the first eight months of 2008, a new venture involving government, private and educational constituents has been launched to help deal with the problem. Dubbed the Center for Applied Identity Management Research (CAIMR), the group is […]

Lest you thought that the pace of newly reported data loss incidents had slowed down — perhaps driven by greater awareness, improved security or tighter compliance regulations — the latest numbers published by the Identity Theft Resource Center tell an entirely different story. According to the ITRC’s October 2008 report, (PDF) publicly reported data breaches […]

Renowned botnet researcher Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks offers up some interesting new data in a recent blog posting over at CircleID on the fast-flux networks being used to prop up botnet activity. One of the most interesting new angles is that there are actually not that many fast-flux nets in use, but they are […]

Guess who else figured out that RIM’s BlackBerry ecosystem is the most secure wireless business platform out there? Yep, it’s the cyber-criminals. According to an interesting piece typed up earlier this week by reporters at The Vancouver Sun, law enforcement types with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have found that greater numbers of criminals have […]