Matthew Hines

People like myself are frequently guilty of blaming crime blocs in Eastern Europe, Russia and the Far East for generating the majority of today’s cyber-attacks, but the truth is that far more threats are being leveled at users from computers based here in the United States than from any other country in the world. In […]

Most malware gangs probably don’t have many members nearing retirement age, but that hasn’t stopped them from targeting people who already have, or at least their Web site. Security and e-mail filtering specialists MX Logic have discovered a section of the official AARP Web site that has come under the control of badware brokers. According […]

Researchers are warning of an emerging malware campaign that advertises itself as airline e-ticket information to lure users into infecting their machines with a set of Trojan attacks. First identified by anti-virus specialists BitDefender, the messages contain a .ZIP attachment that is positioned as e-ticket information, but that instead delivers the malware when downloaded. Many […]

Talk about letting your guard down. Roger Thompson, chief research officer at AVG, has discovered a compromise in a National Guard site through which one of the agency’s URLs is now being used to distribute spyware. The page in question, which belongs to the Texas National Guard, has been linked to another site somewhere in […]

The fine folks over at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society have added another powerful ally to their Stopbadware online malware filtering project by snaring Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser and other open source software, to officially cooperate in the effort. Mozilla joins the veritable online “who’s who” of powerful sponsors that […]

Researchers have uncovered an extremely serious security flaw in Adobe’s popular Illustrator graphics program. Found by Ernst & Young vulnerability expert and sometimes blogger Nathan McFeters, the unpatched problem in Illustrator has garnered a “highly critical” ranking from Secunia — among others — Secunia’s most severe vulnerability rating. According to the researchers, the involved vulnerabilities […]

Somewhere Britney Spears is weeping softly into a throw pillow adorned with her formerly wholesome countenance and wondering where it all went wrong. No, we’re not talking about her music career, her acting career or her perfume line. For, even worse than the sting of seeing her star fall across those heavenly domains, today Spears […]

I remember when I got to college in 1992 there was this guy I met in my dorm who was already way tapped into the Internet and IT security and white hat hacking. While my own computer skills consisted of playing games and knowing how to write Cobol programs that would produce groups of letters […]

Once again it’s been proven that government networks that one might consider to be among the most secure in the world are not immune to malware and insider schemes, and that government entities themselves are still spying on everyone like crazy. Everyone is familiar with the DoD’s reported ownage via spyware last year, for which […]

Sometimes pictures help… a lot. Most of you who follow this blog are likely very familiar with the concept of botnets, but, as with the study of human anatomy, sometimes it’s helpful to review what these things actually look like from a schematic point of view. Within that context, it might be worth your while […]