Matthew Hines

E-mail security specialists Commtouch Software have released their latest security trends report, which illustrates the major hand that botnet-controlled machines continue to play in the distribution of spam and malware. According to the company’s Q2 2008 E-mail Threats Trend Report, roughly 10 million zombie computers were actively distributing spam and e-mail-based malware on average every […]

AV maker Panda Software published its report on malware trends for the second quarter of 2008 and finds that Trojan attacks were by far the most common form of threat being created between April and June. According to the report, more than 63 percent of the new malicious code samples unearthed by Panda’s researchers during […]

It’s not all that surprising, as current events have long been a staple among the lures employed by malware distributors seeking to trick people into clicking on their attack-laden URLs or e-mail attachments, but the latest run of threats advertised under the guise of a fake news story about U.S. troops invading Iran would seem […]

Well, as if having a security threat research site modeled in direct imitation of Grand Theft Auto (over 6 million copies sold in a week) weren’t reinforcement enough that malware has gone ultra-mainstream, now malware has truly entered into the general lexicon. Quite literally, that is. Dictionary standard-bearer Merriam-Webster announced July 7 that “malware” is […]

Security software giant McAfee recently published the results of an interesting month-long project aimed at putting a fix on just how bad the issue of unsolicited e-mail remains — along with gaining added insight into some geographic and content-based trends around the ever-present nuisance messages. In a novel approach to tracking the flow of spam, […]

It would seem that multimedia playing software programs are always among the most popular sources of high-level security risks, and this time it’s the lesser-known but well thought-of VLC music and video system that has turned up on the vulnerability scrolls. Secunia researchers have issued a “highly critical” warning for the free VLC player, affecting […]

There’s already been a lot written and said about the potential for mobile malware and the need to better secure next-generation handheld devices, but other than some beta-type anti-virus programs and the work of handset makers and carriers to control the applications that end up on their phones, there hasn’t been a lot of work […]

An interesting post from McAfee researcher Toralv Dirro this week suggests that the seemingly endless proliferation of larger volumes of malware variants may actually be hitting a plateau. Having spiked dramatically since roughly the beginning of 2006, rising from approximately 3 million samples at that time to more than 11 million samples in April 2008, […]

Sticking to this week’s hot topic of browser security — building off an influential new report published on the topic on Tuesday and Mozilla’s move yesterday to address a dozen newly discovered flaws in its Firefox browser — Microsoft has announced a pair of new/retrenched security features that will arrive in the next rebuild of […]

Mozilla has released a scad of security bulletins outlining many new vulnerabilities discovered in its Firefox browser. All users of the software have been advised to download an updated version to protect their machines against potential exploitation. Rated en masse by researchers at Secunia as “highly critical” (4 out of 5 on its scale of […]