News Wrap: Ransomware Extortion Tactics, Contact-Tracing App Security Worries

Threatpost editors discuss the top news stories of the week ended May 15, including: Recent ransomware attacks, including ones targeting healthcare giant Magellan, the IT office that supports Texas appellate courts and judicial agencies, and a popular law firm that works with several A-list...

RATicate Group Hits Industrial Firms With Revolving Payloads

Researchers have unearthed a new cybercrime group, RATicate, which is behind several waves of malspam attacks targeting industrial companies with various information-stealing payloads – from LokiBot to Agent Tesla. At least six separate campaigns have been tied to RATicate, with the first wave...

The US Says Chinese Hackers Went Too Far During the Covid-19 Crisis

The FBI and DHS say that Beijing's hacking “jeopardizes” the delivery of much-needed Covid-19 treatment options...

Open-sourcing new COVID-19 threat intelligence

A global threat requires a global response. While the world faces the common threat of COVID-19, defenders are working overtime to protect users all over the globe from cybercriminals using COVID-19 as a lure to mount attacks. As a security intelligence community, we are stronger when we share...

Utah Says No to Apple/Google COVID-19 Tracing; Debuts Startup App

The state of Utah has settled on a contact-tracing mobile app that collects detailed user location information to track the spread of COVID-19 among citizens – eschewing the API model proposed by Apple and Google in April. The app is called “Healthy Together” and it was created by a startup calle...

‘Modern Bank Heists’ Threat Report Finds Dramatic Increase in Cyberattacks Against Financial Institutions Amid COVID-19

This marks the third edition of the Modern Bank Heists report, which takes an annual pulse of some of the financial industry’s top CISOs and security leaders. Thank you, again, for reading along and thank you to the 25 security leaders who participated in this year’s survey. This survey offers mo...

Texas Courts Won't Pay Up in Ransomware Attack

A ransomware attack has hit the information technology office that supports Texas appellate courts and judicial agencies, leading to their websites and computer servers being shut down. The office said that it will not pay the ransom requested by the cybercriminals. Specifically affected is the...

Leaked NHS Docs Reveal Roadmap, Concerns Around Contact-Tracing App

A COVID-19 contact-tracing app to be rolled out by the UK’s National Health Service NHS has been thrust into the spotlight thanks to sensitive documents being leaked via a public Google Drive link. Contact tracing has emerged as a top idea for dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and is consider...

Empowering your remote workforce with end-user security awareness

COVID-19 has rapidly transformed how we all work. Organizations need quick and effective user security and awareness training to address the swiftly changing needs of the new normal for many of us. To help our customers deploy user training quickly, easily and effectively, we are announcing the...

Threat Spotlight: Astaroth — Maze of obfuscation and evasion reveals dark stealer

By Nick Biasini, Edmund Brumaghin and Nick Lister. Cisco Talos is detailing an information stealer, Astaroth, that has been targeting Brazil with a variety of lures, including COVID-19 for the past nine to 12 months.Complex maze of obfuscation and anti-analysis/evasion techniques implemented by...

CISA-FBI Joint Announcement on PRC Targeting of COVID-19 Research Organizations

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI have jointly released a Public Service Announcement on the People’s Republic of China’s targeting of COVID-19 research organizations. CISA and FBI encourage COVID-19 research organizations to...

Important: Red Hat Security Advisory: kernel security and bug fix update

An update for kernel is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Important. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System CVSS base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from th...

RHEL 8 : kernel (RHSA-2020:2102)

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 8 host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the RHSA-2020:2102 advisory. The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system. Security Fixes: Kernel: NetLabel: null pointer...

Analyzing the Effects of COVID-19 on mPulse Traffic

The events surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and in particular various social-distancing measures quarantine, shelter in place, etc., have had an impact on people's lives and routines across the world. As internet usage is a large part of those routines, we wanted to see how usage changed as the...

Sphinx Malware Returns to Riddle U.S. Targets, with Modifications

The Zeus Sphinx banking trojan has seen a recent resurgence in the United States, sporting some modifications and using COVID-19 spam as a lure. Sphinx re-emerged in December but saw a big spike in March via the use of coronavirus themes. Since April, it has been seen attacking U.S. targets with ...

Lock and Code S1Ep6: Recognizing facial recognition’s flaws with Chris Boyd

This week on Lock and Code, we discuss the top security headlines generated right here on Labs and around the Internet. In addition, we talk to Chris Boyd, lead malware intelligence analyst at Malwarebytes, about facial recognition technology—its early history, its proven failures at accuracy, an...

India's Covid-19 Contact Tracing App Could Leak Patient Locations

The system's use of GPS data could let hackers pinpoint who reports a positive diagnosis...

Europe’s Largest Private Hospital Operator Fresenius Hit by Ransomware

Fresenius, Europe's largest private hospital operator and a major provider of dialysis products and services that are in such high demand thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, has been hit in a ransomware cyber attack on its technology systems. The company said the incident has limited some of its...

Lessons learned from the Microsoft SOC—Part 3c: A day in the life part 2

This is the sixth blog in the Lessons learned from the Microsoft SOC series designed to share our approach and experience from the front lines of our security operations center SOC protecting Microsoft and our Detection and Response Team DART helping our customers with their incidents. For a visu...

A week in security (April 27 – May 3)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we looked at how secure the cloud is, understood why unexpected demand can influence an organization to consider their “just in time” JIT system, speculated on why the threat actors behind the Troldesh ransomware suddenly released thousands of decryption keys,...