Matthew Hines

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 […]

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 […]