Matthew Hines

Somewhere Britney Spears is weeping softly into a throw pillow adorned with her formerly wholesome countenance and wondering where it all went wrong. No, we’re not talking about her music career, her acting career or her perfume line. For, even worse than the sting of seeing her star fall across those heavenly domains, today Spears […]

I remember when I got to college in 1992 there was this guy I met in my dorm who was already way tapped into the Internet and IT security and white hat hacking. While my own computer skills consisted of playing games and knowing how to write Cobol programs that would produce groups of letters […]

Once again it’s been proven that government networks that one might consider to be among the most secure in the world are not immune to malware and insider schemes, and that government entities themselves are still spying on everyone like crazy. Everyone is familiar with the DoD’s reported ownage via spyware last year, for which […]

Sometimes pictures help… a lot. Most of you who follow this blog are likely very familiar with the concept of botnets, but, as with the study of human anatomy, sometimes it’s helpful to review what these things actually look like from a schematic point of view. Within that context, it might be worth your while […]

Never underestimate the power of one good security research report, as it appears that the ripple effect touched off by KnujOn’s phantom domain paper from a couple of weeks back is still shaking things up. Here’s the latest domino to fall: EstDomains, a domain registrar that was recently identified in the report as a shady […]

If you’re one of those people of the belief that the much-publicized Large Hadron Collider buried under the border between France and Switzerland could potentially put an end to the world as we know it by mistakenly creating an Earth-consuming black hole, you might not want to read the rest of this post. Because, European […]

It’s not often that you might associate spyware with a positive situation, as typically the programs’ impact involves data theft, cyber-stalking or at best password theft and online account hijacking of some sort. However, a case reported by local papers in the United Kingdom Sept. 9 illustrates how sometimes spyware programs can produce beneficial results, […]

Adding to a spate of recent threats launched via social networking portals and other Web 2.0 sites including MySpace and Facebook, researchers at PandaLabs have unearthed a program used by attackers to create fake YouTube pages that are meant to lure in unsuspecting end users. Dubbed “YTFakeCreator,” the widget creates realistic YouTube URL spoofs that […]

Many of us who have been following the cyber-crime scene for a few years have openly griped about the lack of success that law enforcement officials have had in bringing the bad guys to justice. LEOs themselves have long blamed a lack of dedicated resources and the need to more aggressively pursue criminals in the […]

The lesson of this story? If you believe in the quality of your work, don’t let anyone try to move you off your spot. Over a week after anti-spam research house KnujOn first called out India-based registrar Directi for allowing its business partners to support illegal online pharmacies, the registrar has sought a truce with […]

Well, they went straight for the jugular. You knew there was bound to be plenty of election-themed spam and malware generated during the current U.S. presidential campaign of 2008, as social engineering tactics have been following popular news trends for quite some time. But, apparently the bad guys aren’t going to be satisfied simply to […]

You may have seen my blog filed from this year’s Black Hat show regarding an interesting demonstration by a pair of researchers about the potential security risks related to implanted medical devices. The presentation, delivered by researchers Tadayoshi Kohno and Kevin Fu, outlined the lack of sufficient security controls built into today’s implanted medical gizmos, […]