Matthew Hines

With the worldwide economy still mired in a semi-historic slump, some savvy cyber-attackers are departing from the usual raft of Santa Claus e-cards and reindeer-in-the-living-room themed multimedia codec attacks in favor of threats engineered to suck in those people desperate for a few extra bucks to add to their holiday budgets. More people than ever […]

Banks and other financial institutions have long lived at the center of electronic attackers’ crosshairs, but campaigns specifically aimed at ripping off commercial banking institutions and their customers are causing serious problems of late, according to security researchers. In looking more closely at several highly publicized incidents and assessing trends in recently observed cybercrime activity, […]

As soon as you see the words “beauty queen” and “sex tape” being used in the same sentence it’s pretty easy to predict that we’ll seen soon see a spate of related cyber-attacks. And with the sex tape scandal of former Miss California unfolding, the expected range of threats aimed at taking advantage of the […]

Large organizations continue to invest significant amounts of money in IT security initiatives despite the lagging worldwide economy, but most continue to struggle in preventing today’s sophisticated electronic attacks, researchers contend. In a recent report on the pervasiveness of online threats, and the inability of most organizations to sufficiently protect themselves against such risks, analysts […]

After leading a concerted effort shut down the notorious Mega-D botnet (aka Odzok), researchers with FireEye are trying to estimate the size of the massive fleet of zombie machines, which is an interesting art in and of itself. After doing some detailed research into the operation of Mega-D, which was known for its ability to […]

Typically you’ve got to wait until at least December to begin seeing security researchers’ foreboding predictions for the malware and unethical hacking landscape in the next year to come. However, in keeping with the theory of unified cultural creep, or the increasingly invoked notion that supports the strange reason why we’ve begun to see Christmas […]

People who work in the health care field always seem to cringe when they hear others talk about watching popular hospital dramas like “ER” on TV, and, upon questioning, will typically offer that such shows either aren’t very realistic or actually remind them too much of their real, grisly work to be much fun to […]

Malware distributors continue to flex their abilities to tap into whatever’s hot in terms of search engine activity, even on a daily basis. We’ve grown accustomed to the idea that whenever there is a major news item worldwide, from natural disasters to celebrity gossip stories, attackers will be hot on the heels of legitimate reports […]

Anyone with a busy e-mail in-box has likely noticed the dramatic uptick in Facebook-related phishing campaigns making the rounds over the last several weeks. Waves of the threats are surging across the Web daily, encouraging users to click on an attachment based on their need to update their Facebook log-in information. For people like myself […]

Researchers with Trend Micro’s TrendLabs group have gotten their hands on the code behind the dangerous “Elite Control” botnet, allowing for a closer look at the attack’s underpinnings and capabilities. TrendLabs Advanced Threats Researcher Maxim Goncharov detailed his findings in a recent blog post after coming across a free copy of the botnet’s source code […]

Researchers with BitDefender are tracking the emergence of a new spate of phony overnight delivery notice attacks, calling out a set of threats currently in circulation that attempt to create backdoors that leave affected machines almost completely under the control of their assailants. The attacks also utilize popular rogue AV scanner techniques to further entrap […]

Online “hacktivism” continues to expand and diversify as protesters find new ways to use the electronic realm to display their support or displeasure for offline politics, and researchers with anti-botnet specialists Damballa are following the maturation of some new models for cyber-protesting that they’re citing as fairly impressive in terms of their overall advancement of […]