Matthew Hines

Malware authors and distributors have been perfecting methods to hide the nature of their work for over a decade now, creating endless varieties of Trojans, backdoors and downloaders that appear to be one kind of program (think rogue AV), but of course turn out to be something far more ominous. New evidence suggests, however, that […]

As online auction sites have continued to proliferate beyond eBay, uBid and Yahoo, use of auction marketing tools has taken off as users of smaller services seek methods to get their items in front of more potential buyers’ eyeballs. Unsurprisingly, as phishers continue to diversify their own efforts, they’ve caught on to auction marketing tools […]

Many businesses may still find it hard to get their URLs to the top of Google’s search results pages, but malware gangs are having more success than ever at tapping into people’s interests and serving up attacks right where people go to looking for information about their favorite topics. According to researchers with AV vendor […]

We’ve known for years that industries that control large amounts of highly sensitive data (financial services) and/or assets (utilities) have been sitting squarely in cyber-attackers sights, as the threats tend to go where the money and power (quite literally) is there for the taking. In the case of industries where organizations retain huge volumes of […]

Security researchers are finding more clues of an emerging battle being carried out between the long-running Zeus botnet and newcomer SpyEye, which has been engineered specifically to take over machines that were previously infected by Zeus. After first noting the growing prevalence of botnet attacks being created with the emerging SpyEye (or EyeBot) kit last […]

As we’ve come to expect in concert with the arrival of almost every major worldwide news event these days, cyber criminals are already seeking to tap into widespread interest in the ongoing 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver via a spate of attacks with themes tied to the competition. Most notably, attackers are hoping to […]

Despite widespread awareness of cybercrime and the resulting avalanche of electronic identity theft, the issue of people having their names and accounts hijacked online continues to spiral out of control. According to the latest version of the annual Identity Fraud Survey Report conducted by Javelin Strategy and Research — which is based on interviews conducted […]

In a relatively new instance of phishing innovation, attackers are directly targeting users of one of the nation’s larger communications providers by launching phony, but very realistic “secure” online log-in URLs. As first reported by researchers with Trend Micro’s TrendLabs group, phishers are specifically going after customers of CenturyLink, the fourth largest local exchange company […]

The malware toolkit behind the Zeus botnet has become one of the most successful iterations of such a package yet discovered, but that doesn’t mean that competitors aren’t always on the rise. According to researchers at Symantec, the newer, more expensive SpyEye botnet kit is starting to grow in popularity as attackers seek out a […]

Tucked in a back room located amid a slew of other mundane offices in a beautiful old house on Harvard’s historic Cambridge campus, a team of researchers has spent the last four years working on a project aimed at stemming the rising flood of illegal and unethical programs overwhelming the Web. Having lived and thrived […]