Matthew Hines

Of all the potential security evolutions expected to manifest themselves during 2010, smarter social engineering will remain the leading issue, researchers report. As security defense mechanisms continue to get stouter and trends like mobile malware and attacks on Apple Mac technologies will continue to play out on a smaller scale, the efforts of scammers and […]

Canadian online pharmacy spam has been piling up for years as scammers seek to take advantage of interest in lower-cost pills and other medications. However, in a new twist, the messages have actually begun speaking their minds to recipients. Researchers at Sophos have uncovered a unique variation of the time-honored pharma spam theme, as some […]

If you’ve ever found yourself standing in front of a half-destroyed wall wondering whether or not you should have just hired a contractor instead of smashing it down on your own… congratulations! You may also be capable of running a sophisticated botnet! All joking aside, the do-it-yourself botnet kit phenomenon has been raging on for […]

Researchers are reporting as new phishing attack aimed at stealing web site content management system log-in credentials in order to poison involved targets’ sites with fraudulent e-banking attack code. According to a new report issued by financial services anti-fraud specialist Trusteer, which last week released an interesting report on larger e-banking phishing trends, the attack […]

Large organizations continue to struggle to lock down their critical database assets despite years of work aimed at doing so, according to a new report issued by Enterprise Strategy Group. According to the paper, authored in cooperation with database security vendor Applications Security Inc., over 60 percent of the 175 North American enterprises (1,000 or […]

Despite the longstanding efforts of banks and the IT security community to warn end users, specifically people using online banking applications, to beware of phishing schemes, many people who open the e-mails and visiting the phony sites still end up handing over their credentials, researchers claim. In a new paper that seeks to scope the […]

With the worldwide economy still mired in a semi-historic slump, some savvy cyber-attackers are departing from the usual raft of Santa Claus e-cards and reindeer-in-the-living-room themed multimedia codec attacks in favor of threats engineered to suck in those people desperate for a few extra bucks to add to their holiday budgets. More people than ever […]

Banks and other financial institutions have long lived at the center of electronic attackers’ crosshairs, but campaigns specifically aimed at ripping off commercial banking institutions and their customers are causing serious problems of late, according to security researchers. In looking more closely at several highly publicized incidents and assessing trends in recently observed cybercrime activity, […]

As soon as you see the words “beauty queen” and “sex tape” being used in the same sentence it’s pretty easy to predict that we’ll seen soon see a spate of related cyber-attacks. And with the sex tape scandal of former Miss California unfolding, the expected range of threats aimed at taking advantage of the […]

Large organizations continue to invest significant amounts of money in IT security initiatives despite the lagging worldwide economy, but most continue to struggle in preventing today’s sophisticated electronic attacks, researchers contend. In a recent report on the pervasiveness of online threats, and the inability of most organizations to sufficiently protect themselves against such risks, analysts […]