Matthew Hines

The trend for ages has been for hackers and malware distributors to tap into current events to more effectively target their attacks at end users, and just like everyone else, when the bad guys want to know what’s hot, news-wise, they’re heading right over to Google. In a recent report published by Webroot, researchers with […]

Bucking some reports to the contrary, which find spam levels incrementally increasing over time, MessageLabs’ latest research paper claims that unsolicited e-mail dropped noticeably during Q3 2008, driven in part by the shutdown of a nefarious ISP. Despite the fact that the MessageLabs Intelligence Report for September/third quarter 2008 aligns the lowered volumes of spam […]

Adware volume jumped during Q3 of 2008, driven largely via the use of schemes involving fake anti-virus programs, security researchers report. According to PandaLabs’ Q3 Quarterly Report, over 31 percent of the malicious programs tracked by the company between July 1 and September 30 ’08 were adware applications that attempt to load themselves onto end […]

Well, it seems that ICANN has indeed been listening to security researchers that have been increasingly critical of certified registrars that appear to be letting cybercriminals abuse their services. Or it has in fact been moving to enforce its rules of operation for registrars a bit more aggressively. Earlier this week, ICANN issued so-called “breach […]

With a long road to go in the official race for the White House, Democratic candidate Barack Obama is already putting a sound beating to his Republican counterpart John McCain, in the arena of spam generation, that is. And no, we’re not talking about all those plaintive e-mails showing up in your personal inbox asking […]

So, it’s been confirmed that the Chinese government has been eavesdropping on politically sensitive Skype conversations conducted by and with its citizens, but is anyone truly surprised by this? I guess by writing this I’m officially throwing away any chance of ever visiting this country I’m so fascinated by, but when we live in a […]

Today is the day that the latest iteration of the PCI Data Security Standard, version 1.2, officially hits the streets, and eWeek Security Watch was recently offered the unique opportunity to sit down with Bob Russo, General Manager of the PCI Council, to chat about what the new version of the standard means, and how […]

Data loss is most often blamed on ingenious hackers and technical complexity within enterprise businesses, but many incidents are instead related to faulty user behavior and careless mistakes, according to a new report published by networking giant Cisco. According to the report issued on Tuesday, which is based on interviews carried out with 2,000 workers […]

Much has been written and said about the U.S. government’s need to improve its electronic defenses against the potential for cyber-attacks carried out by foreign nations. The issue was highlighted in 2007, when government officials openly complained about the Chinese government’s (successful?) attempts to hack into computers controlled by the Department of Defense, and even […]

Apparently Saturday Night Live isn’t the only constituency seeking to profit by tying its fortunes to presidential-themed video clips these days. In addition to the highly publicized skits that SNL has produced in the last several weeks that have parodied the presidential and vice presidential candidates and generated a torrent of interest online, cyber-criminals are […]

As noted in a post in this space earlier this week, security researchers have begun publicizing the emergence of a dangerous new online attack model, dubbed clickjacking. For full details click here, but in short the attack technique allows hackers who lure users to malicious or infected URLs to take control of their browsers and […]

Prominent security researchers Robert “RSnake” Hansen and Jeremiah Grossman may have cancelled their scheduled presentation on “clickjacking” — a newly discovered form of browser vulnerability exploitation — at the OWASP NYC AppSec Conference Sept. 22 to 25, but the two experts have begun sharing some details about the attack technique. Hansen and Grossman, who frequently […]