Matthew Hines

There’s already been a lot written and said about the potential for mobile malware and the need to better secure next-generation handheld devices, but other than some beta-type anti-virus programs and the work of handset makers and carriers to control the applications that end up on their phones, there hasn’t been a lot of work […]

An interesting post from McAfee researcher Toralv Dirro this week suggests that the seemingly endless proliferation of larger volumes of malware variants may actually be hitting a plateau. Having spiked dramatically since roughly the beginning of 2006, rising from approximately 3 million samples at that time to more than 11 million samples in April 2008, […]

Sticking to this week’s hot topic of browser security — building off an influential new report published on the topic on Tuesday and Mozilla’s move yesterday to address a dozen newly discovered flaws in its Firefox browser — Microsoft has announced a pair of new/retrenched security features that will arrive in the next rebuild of […]

Mozilla has released a scad of security bulletins outlining many new vulnerabilities discovered in its Firefox browser. All users of the software have been advised to download an updated version to protect their machines against potential exploitation. Rated en masse by researchers at Secunia as “highly critical” (4 out of 5 on its scale of […]

A new research paper put together by researchers from Google, IBM and CENL (the Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory) puts some serious weight behind a concept that has become all too familiar to many of us following the world of IT security on a daily basis — that is, that Web browsers have become the […]

How’s this for instant gratification? Fortinet released its June malware activity report this morning while most people here in the United States were winding down in preparation for the impending Independence Day and indulging in light beer bubble bath fantasies and cheeseburger dreams. (FTR make mine a Sammy Light and steak sandwich, please.) Anyhow, just […]

Researchers at endpoint security specialist Sophos are warning of a new set of attacks targeted at .MOBI Web pages. The SQL threats highlighted in the research are interesting because they represent new innovation in the world of mobile attacks, which have yet to materialize to the extent that experts once predicted they would, but which […]

The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, a special interest group focused on lowering the negative impact of spam and e-mail/IM-borne malware (in particular botnets) on the entire electronic communications ecosystem, has released a new set of best practices to help ISPs and network operators deal with the ubiquitous problems. Better known as MAAWG, the consortium of […]

The smaht folks at StopBadware.org–the anti-malware/adware team backed by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society–published some interesting stats earlier this week that highlight the growing use of Chinese Net infrastructure in the proliferation of unwanted software over the Web. The use of Chinese servers and ISPs in the distribution of badware (defined […]

The hits just keep on coming, as two of the world’s most high-profile software makers were forced to distribute security updates for critical vulnerabilities in their most popular products over the last several days. Microsoft issued a patch on June 24 for a “critical” vulnerability discovered in the core XML services code base of many […]

It’s a surprise to very few who follow the malware economy closely, but new metrics have arrived that chart the continued proliferation of the malware epidemic. It was hard not to shake your head when anti-virus vendor Symantec reported this spring that it had recorded 711,912 unique threats during the course of 2007, a 468 […]

The entire foundation of our trust in the Internet has been eroded in recent years by the growing popularity of malware attacks propagated via hacked Web sites, and there’s evidence that the problem only continues to intensify. Several years ago, users were thought to be largely insulated from the problem if they merely policed their […]