Matthew Hines

Researchers are finding hundreds of thousands of stranded bots hopelessly attempting to connect to command and control centers that were taken offline when shady hosting provider McColo was cut off by its own hosts last week. After Washington Post blogger Brian Krebs and a team of other interested parties, including researchers at FireEye, worked to […]

Web-based malware attacks are increasingly being targeted at specific vertical markets, security researchers contend, with certain sectors finding themselves in the crosshairs far more frequently these days and a growth in the volume of threats being aimed at many industries now drastically outpacing attacks on the long-beleaguered financial services segment. According to a recent report […]

Cisco published the final installment of its comprehensive study into data leakage trends last week, with the latest results highlighting the continued contribution of insider activity to the overall problem of electronic information loss. According to the report, based on a survey of 10,000-plus workers worldwide conducted for Cisco by pollsters InsightExpress, both malicious and […]

Malicious attacks carried out directly against networking infrastructure have taken off in nearly every sense over the last year, according to the latest report issued by researchers at backbone security specialist Arbor Networks. The company, which markets threat monitoring technology and services to large network operators and infrastructure providers including ISPs, contends that attacks have […]

I don’t tend to cover much vendor activity here in the blog, but an interesting new anti-malware applications provider officially brought its initial product to market this week, and it does seem worthy of a mention. NovaShield, which is pitching a new brand of behavioral analysis technology to help solve issues with today’s cutting-edge malware […]

Add MX Logic to the growing list of messaging security specialists charting a noticeable downturn in the overall level of spam e-mail that they’re processing via their customers’ networks each month. Following several other similar reports that have pinpointed minor downturns in the sheer volume of unsolicited e-mail finding its way into people’s in-boxes, at […]

I had the opportunity to spend some time last week with Tom Kellermann, a member of the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency and a colleague of mine at my full-time employer. In a series of interviews with members of the print media about President-elect Obama’s potential policies around cyber-security, Tom repeatedly brought […]

According to Sunbelt Software’s monthly listing of the most ubiquitous malware and spyware attacks, an entirely new family of threats emerged rapidly during October. Based on the company’s research, which is aggregated using data filtered by its AV and anti-spyware technologies, Sunbelt’s report of the top ten most prevalent attacks during the month includes INF.Autorun […]

The security world is abuzz with news today that both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns had their IT systems hacked and infiltrated in recent months. As originally reported by Newsweek, “The computer systems of both the Obama and McCain campaigns were victims of a sophisticated cyber-attack by an unknown foreign entity, prompting a federal […]

Now that Halloween is over and Thanksgiving is still a few weeks off, it’s time to sink our teeth into something different, or really something that’s rapidly becoming equally as familiar a taste. That’s spam of course. BitDefender’s Malware City security blog has launched a weekly spam analysis piece dubbed the “Spam Omelet” that looks […]