It’s beginning to look a lot like the holiday season – and with the holidays comes various opportunities for cyber-scrooges to exploit. While users prepare for the festivities, cybercriminals look for opportunities to scam holiday shoppers with various tricks. To shed more light on how these crooks are putting a damper on user’s holiday season, McAfee survey

If Benjamin Franklin were alive today, I have no doubt that he’d revise his famous quote: ‘Nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes’ to include online holiday scams! For there is no question that online scammers and cybercriminals love the festive season! The bulk of us are time-poor, stressed, and sporting to-do lists as long as our arms – s

Cybercriminals seem to get more and more sophisticated with their attacks, and phishing scams are no different. The McAfee Labs team has observed a new phishing campaign using a fake voicemail message to trick victims into giving up their Office 365 email credentials. During the investigation, the team has found three different phishing kits being used to ex

You’re familiar with the cybercriminals that go after users’ credit card information and look to spread malicious links, but recently, one hacker decided to send a different message. According to Vice’s Motherboard, a hacker accessed TOMS Shoes’ mailing list and sent an email encouraging users to log off and go enjoy the outdoors. The email specificall

Let’s Reverse the Threat of Identity Theft!! Our online identities are critical. In fact, you could argue that they are our single most unique asset. Whether we are applying for a job, a mortgage or even starting a new relationship, keeping our online identity protected, secure and authentic is essential. This week is Stay Smart Online Week in Australia R

Fears and phobias. We all have them. But what are your biggest ones? I absolutely detest snakes but spiders don’t worry me at all. Well, new research by McAfee shows that cybercriminals and the fear of being hacked are now the 5th greatest fear among Aussies. With news of data breaches and hacking crusades filling our news feed on a regular basis, many of us

Fact – your social media posts may affect your career, or worse case, your identity! New research from the world’s largest dedicated cybersecurity firm, McAfee, has revealed that two thirds (67%) of Aussies are embarrassed by the content that appears on their social media profiles. Yikes! And just to make the picture even more complicated, 34% of Aussies adm

I can’t recall the last time I gave my teenage daughter cash for anything. If she needs money for gas, I Venmo it. A Taco Bell study break with the roommates? No problem. With one click, I transfer money from my Venmo account to hers. She uses a Venmo credit card to make her purchase. To this mom, cash apps may be the best thing to happen to parenting

At this point in your adult, digital life, it’s likely you’ve experienced some kind of personal data breech—either you’ve had one of your a social profiles hijacked, a mobile device lost or stolen, or had a run in with credit card theft. If you are paying attention to the headlines, the buzz is all about Data Privacy and how cyber living and connectiv

One Phish, Two Phish: How Cybercriminals Reel in 80% of Users with Deceptive Emails We’ve all seen it. The innocent-looking message from what appears to be your bank, reminding you that it’s time to update your account information with the simple click of a link and the entering of some personal information. Everything looks in order upon initial inspection.

I want to share some of the good work McAfee Labs did in the past year in optimizing and enhancing the V2 DATs (malware definition files, also known as AVV DATs) used in McAfee VirusScan Enterprise and other McAfee enterprise products. In 2014, we reduced DAT size by more than 45% to about 70MB, down from a high of about 132MB. These enhancements have led to

For McAfee Labs the New Year will start with a lot of excitement. During the next 10 weeks, several of us researchers will teach a master class at Oregon State University. During this class, “Defending against the Dark Arts,” more than 60 students will be served a diversity of topics, including malware, forensics, memory analysis, exploits, rootkits, and mob

In the middle of 2012 McAfee Labs observed the complex malware XDocCrypt infecting documents, Excel workbooks, and executable files. Recently we have seen a similar infection method that attacks PDF, MSI (Windows installer), and executables, though the current malware is not as complex as XDocCrypt. W32/PDFCrypt is not complex. The coding standards, propagat

Imagine that you want to pull up a certain file on your computer. You click on the file and suddenly a notice flashes on your screen saying your computer has been compromised and in order to get your files back, you need to pay up some money. This, ladies and gentlemen, is ransomware, a nasty type of malware that, unfortunately, hackers love to use. Ransomwa

Adobe Flash vulnerabilities and exploits have worried users and security professionals for many years. The situation today remains serious. A quick search of the National Vulnerability Database shows 277 vulnerabilities reported in Flash Player since 2011. For Flash zero-day attacks (which means that there was no patch from Adobe when the vulnerability was e