Matthew Hines

Many of today’s Trojan malware threats utilize sophisticated techniques to circumvent firewall technologies and communicate with their distributors and/or controllers, but researchers with Symantec have peeled back the layers on the widespread Clampi attack to reveal a particularly innovative approach to defeating such defensive mechanisms. In a recent blog post, Symantec researcher Nicolas Falliere detailed […]

Researchers who specialize in tracking the use of automated programs and other means to commit click fraud — or the illegitimate inflation of online ad traffic for the purpose of boosting profits — are pointing to the increased use of botnets by scammers seeking to line their pockets via ill-begotten trade. Click Forensics, which has […]

Celebrity sites, at least those using the names and likenesses of celebrities for the sake of drawing in Web surfers, have long been a breeding ground for attacks, with the likes of Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton and more recently Jessica Biel being used to lure end users into visiting URLs that are primarily used to […]

Phony anti-virus programs that attempt to prey on people’s cyber-security concerns only to download malware onto their endpoints have been a major issue for several years now, and show few signs of fading from widespread usage. And according to a new, in-depth report on the subject published by security software giant Symantec, the groups behind […]

Despite ongoing efforts to improve international law enforcement in the arena of cybercrime, the groups and individuals at the top of the electronic criminal food chain are not being stopped, or even slowed down, experts contend. Just ahead of the 36th annual CSI security conference being held in Washington Oct. 24-30, Alex Lanstein, security researcher […]

Targeted phishing attacks and non-phishing campaigns involving company brands are among the leading trends in messaging attack patterns according to the latest observations reported by McAfee AVERT Labs. Some 19 out of every 20 e-mails constitute some form of spam, researchers with the security company said, with abuse of popular brand names on the part […]

IT security experts have been calling for greater attention to be paid to the growing risk for cyber-attacks to be carried out against on critical infrastructure assets in the United States, and some on Capitol Hill have bought into the notion of looming cyber-war; a new report funded by the U.S. Air Force contends that […]

Speaking from long-running personal experience, many legitimate news outlets and businesses struggle to master the tricky techniques of search engine optimization in trying to get their content driven to the top of results on Google and other popular engines. However, the scammers working to publicize infected Web sites, both their own and those they’ve owned, […]

The Asprox family of SQL injection attacks that attempt to loop users’ machines into a well known botnet have surged again, victimizing people who visit Web sites that have been infected with its propagation agents. Asprox has begun to swell again in recent weeks, repeating a pattern of on-again off-again growth, experts note. And while […]

The emergence of social media, online multimedia and other user driven content is placing an ever-increasing level of pressure on browser security issues as attackers continue to cook up a seemingly endless array of techniques for assailing the applications using everything from malware to social engineering ploys, experts contend. In a new white paper that […]

Attackers continue to assail users of online video games with scams aimed at parting them with their hard earned virtual assets. Long the target of cybercriminals interested in making off with gamers’ credentials to sell them for a profit, popular massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have become such magnets for hacker activity that they’re […]

Social networks are rapidly becoming a primary channel to market for malware distributors and other cyber-criminals as the use of popular sites such as Twitter continues to take off, and the communications vehicles subsequently create new opportunities for attackers to hide their threats using features such as so-called link shorteners. Attackers have been working to […]