VeriSign is adding malware scanning to its authentication services for Web site operators, the company announced on Monday.

The "VeriSign Trusted" check mark seal indicates to Web surfers that VeriSign has verified that the site represents the organization or company that it purports to be and that it is using encryption to protect communications between the site and its visitors. Now, existing and new VeriSign SSL customers will have their sites scanned daily to check for malware as ...

Matt Drudge and Michael Arrington found themselves this week in an unpleasant position when visitors to their respective Drudge Report and TechCrunch sites were targeted by malware that appeared to have come from ads.

While Drudge vehemently denied it and blamed accusers with playing politics, Arrington acknowledged on Thursday that there had been malware-laden ads on TechCrunch on Wednesday. It's unclear which ad network served up the malware and what type of malware it was, althoug...

Malware developers are going open source in an effort to make their malicious software more useful to fraudsters.

By giving criminal coders free access to malware that steals financial and personal details, the malicious software developers are hoping to expand the capabilities of old Trojans.

According to Candid W?est, threat researcher with security firm Symantec, around 10 percent of the Trojan market is now open source.

The move to an open source business model is allowing criminals t...

Twitter's new malware filter is a sign the social media site is stepping up efforts to stem attacks, but the measure has its shortcomings, say security experts.

Twitter's filtering mechanism was highlighted by Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of F-Secure, in a blog post Monday. When a user tries to submit a tweet with a suspect Web link, the following warning appears:

Twitter's latest security measure was a positive one, es...

Microsoft will launch a public beta of its anti-malware service, Microsoft Security Essentials, on Tuesday as it phases out its Live OneCare suite in favor of a simpler free consumer security offering.

Microsoft Security Essentials, which will run on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7, will be available in the U.S., Brazil, and Israel in English and Brazilian Portuguese. A public beta version for Simplified Chinese will be available later in the year.

The service works like traditional antivi...

Last week, PBWorks founder David Weekly found out from some customers that his hosted collaboration site had been blacklisted by Symantec for hosting malware and, thus, visitors to any of the 10 million pages on PBWorks were being warned that the site wasn't safe.

"(Damn) you, Norton Safe Web. Whenever one file on one PBWorks space has a virus, all of PBworks is marked unsafe?!" a frustrated Weekly wrote on Twitter and Facebook on Thursday. In a follow-up interview, he said: "That's tarnishi...