Matthew Hines

Despite its time-honored status from a technical standpoint, SQL injection remains a massively popular format for online malware campaigns, with a tidal wave of the threats currently emanating out of China. As proven in the recent indictment of American Roberto Gonzalez, charged with helping to carry out some of the largest card data heists discovered […]

New statistics released by search giant Google indicate that it is crawling an ever-growing number of URLs that somehow seek to infect end users’ computers. Despite that fact, the search market leader claims that it is delivering fewer nefarious sites in its search results, thereby shielding greater numbers of Web surfers. In a new report […]

Malware and spam rates may not be on the decline, but a survey of hackers attending the DEFCON 17 conference in Las Vegas earlier this month found that many members of the underground cyber-economy work less during Q3 before ramping up their efforts again during Q4 ahead of the holiday season. Experts have noted for […]

Researchers with online security services provider ScanSafe are warning of a potent new blended attack that seeks to steal end users’ personal data and is spreading rapidly across the Web. Mary Landesman, senior security researcher with ScanSafe, said in a brief blog post that the powerful “cocktail” of backdoor, password stealing malware and Trojan downloader […]

As attackers seek to endlessly vary their threats in order to circumvent reactive security controls and find their way onto more end users’ machines, individual virus samples are appearing, and disappearing, faster than ever, experts contend. For years, malware code writers and distributors have been using techniques including server-side polymorphism to conjure code scripts that […]

Illegal pharmacies have long been a staple of the Internet, despite the efforts of regulators, public and private, aimed at removing them from the Web. Newly published research into ad results provided by Microsoft’s recently launched Bing search engine find that the unauthorized sites are still popping up all over the place, however. The uncertified […]

An interesting new piece of security freeware was launched today as Dasient introduced an open source version of its Web server infection remediation technology. An offspring of Dasient’s Web Anti-Malware (WAM) remediation package, the open source Mod Anti-Malware Lite release is an Apache server module that promises to allow Web site operators, Web hosts and […]

True love never fades, it only hides for a short time to return again even stronger. At least that’s what the romance experts seem to believe. Unfortunately the same can be said of some long-in-the-tooth malware propagation techniques. It’s been like a trip down memory lane of late as malware distributors and spammers have been […]

Spam continues to fluctuate and vary its social and technical delivery models, but there’s no question that the phenomenon of unwanted e-mail is going nowhere but straight to even more people’s in-boxes — no matter what we try to do about it. ISPs shuttered, botnets be damned, malware and cyber-crime aside, the spam epidemic has […]

At least one group of experienced government cyber-security policy makers is already throwing a wet blanket on the newly approved Consensus Audit Guidelines, itself a set of IT security best practices developed by a consortium of government agencies and their private sector partners. The Cyber Secure Institute, an effort led by former policy makers from […]

Heading into yet another annual Black Hat USA conference during which its products will no doubt be publicly hacked, cracked and attacked by numerous security researchers looking to show off their latest techniques, Microsoft is highlighting advancement of a trio of initiatives introduced last year aimed at helping to foster better information sharing among vendors […]

Every corner of the IT industry, or the business world for that matter, claims to have its own set of “rock stars.” However, unlike almost any other sector, the personalities that represent the celebrity contingent in the world of vulnerability research and ethical hacking actually look and act, in many cases, like the performance artists […]