Matthew Hines

Thursday’s report of hacked ATMs loaded with credential-skimming malware applications discovered in Eastern Europe received a lot of attention, and rightfully so, because who among us does not use the devices? And it’s always interesting and somehow shocking to hear of such attacks that target some of the more mundane machines we’ve embedded in our […]

Researchers with security training experts SANS Institute have reported the emergence of a new wave of attacks seeking to take advantage of trust in online banking sites and digital certificate e-banking security programs. The involved attacks target customers of Bank of America, asking targets to click through from e-mail borne links to URLs where they […]

The use of obfuscation to make electronic threats harder to fingerprint is nothing revolutionary in the world of malware, but attackers are increasingly using cutting-edge incarnations of the approach to hide their work and circumvent widely used signature-based AV technologies. As highlighted in a recent blog post by Lumension security expert Paul Henry, despite the […]

For all the hype that has surrounded the issue of SCADA security, a cycle that yours truly has contributed to heartily given the evidence he’s been presented by qualified experts, there haven’t been a ton of real-world examples to point to about the real potential for critical grid infrastructure systems to come under actual cyber-attacks. […]

Hackers and malware authors mastered the art of using social networking and Web 2.0 applications for purposes of ill-refute some time ago, but as with any breed of cyber-attack, when they’ve found a solid avenue to market, the criminals continue to hammer the same methods years after they’ve been discovered as users remain well behind […]

Just as malware attacks have saturated nearly every element of online content distribution, adware continues to follow suit. Even as the legal fate of P2P torrent aggregation site ThePirateBay.org remains in limbo, adware slingers are attempting to ride the site’s coattails to channel message-cluttering ads to PirateBay’s over 3.6 million users. In a blog post […]

Security giant McAfee has is taking a novel approach in attempting to graphically illustrate the risks of hacking and malware attacks to the masses – by taking some real-world cyber-attack scenarios and turning them into short films. Dubbed “H*Commerce: The Business of Hacking You,” the six episode series walks through the hacking nightmares experienced by […]

An interesting lesson in world human geography has been playing out in the malware industry for ages, but it’s always fascinating to examine new flares in cybercrime activity erupting as a particular region gets its hooks into the scene, primarily via the Web. The dynamic societal impact of the Web has seemingly enabled people around […]

Over a year ago, some security research shops began highlighting the rise of a certain set of attacks they said were being driven by the downturn in the worldwide economy. In addition to the most predictable set of social engineering campaigns aimed at tapping into public interest in the economic landslide, the only substantive conclusions […]

The massive malware mine that is McAfee released its quarterly Threats Report earlier this week and, as usual, there’s enough data therein to launch a dozen blogs; however, to summarize: online threats are getting more pervasive and harder to spot, driven by catalysts such as social networking and massive botnets. That’s hardly anything new but […]