Reasonably Clever Extortion E-mail Based on Password Theft

Imagine you've gotten your hands on a file of e-mail addresses and passwords. You want to monetize it, but the site it's for isn't very valuable. How do you use it? You convince the owners of the password to send you money. I recently saw a spam e-mail that ties the password to a porn site. The...

WannaCry Extortion Fraud Reemerges

Extortion emails that threaten recipients with a WannaCry infection if they don’t pay up are making the rounds in the UK and elsewhere. The activity prompted an alert Friday from the City of London’s Action Fraud unit, which said at the time that police had already received almost 300 reports in...

Scarab ransomware: new variant changes tactics

The Scarab ransomware was discovered in June 2017. Since then, several variants have been created and discovered in the wild. The most popular or widespread versions were distributed via the Necurs botnet and initially written in Visual C compiled. However, after unpacking, we've found that anoth...

‘Bad Rabbit’ Ransomware Strikes in Ukraine, Russia

In a similar outbreak to both WannaCry and Petya from earlier this year, it appears a new strain of ransomware known as "Bad Rabbit" has been found spreading in the Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere. Bad Rabbit encrypts the contents of a computer and asks for a payment of 0.05 bitcoins, or about $280...

‘BadRabbit’ Ransomware Burrows Into Russia, Ukraine

ARCHIVED STORY ‘BadRabbit’ Ransomware Burrows Into Russia, Ukraine By Raj Samani · October 24, 2017 This post was researched and written by Tim Hux, David Marcus, Charles McFarland, Douglas McKee, and Raj Samani. McAfee is currently investigating a ransomware campaign known as BadRabbit, which...

Warning: Two Dangerous Ransomware Are Back – Protect Your Computers

Ransomware has been around for a few years but has become an albatross around everyone's neck—from big businesses and financial institutions to hospitals and individuals worldwide—with cyber criminals making millions of dollars. In just past few months, we saw a scary strain of ransomware attacks...

Web Hosting Company Pays $1 Million to Ransomware Hackers to Get Files Back

South Korean web hosting provider has agreed to pay $1 million in bitcoins to hackers after a Linux ransomware infected its 153 servers, encrypting 3,400 business websites and their data, hosted on them. According to a blog post published by NAYANA, the web hosting company, this unfortunate event...

FIN10: Anatomy of a Cyber Extortion Operation

FireEye has identified a set of financially motivated intrusion operations being carried out by a threat actor we have dubbed FIN10. FIN10 is known for compromising networks, stealing sensitive data, and directly engaging victim executives and board members in an attempt to extort them into payin...

Locky Ransomware Roars Back to Life Via Necurs Botnet

Cybercriminals behind the Locky ransomware and Necurs botnet are back in business. Last Friday researchers spotted both delivering nearly 35,000 emails in just a few hours, the first major Locky campaign researchers have seen in months, according to Cisco Talos. Researchers warn the latest Locky...

We asked 170 cyber security pros about ransomware. Here’s what they had to say.

The first week of January, my daughter called to say she couldn’t get into her college website to make changes to her spring schedule. Assuming servers were probably struggling to keep up with increased traffic, I told her to keep trying. However, it soon became apparent what the issue was. An...

Los Angeles College Pays Hackers $28,000 Ransom To Get Its Files Back

Ransomware has turned on to a noxious game of Hackers to get paid effortlessly. Once again the heat was felt by the Los Angeles Valley College LAVC when hackers managed to infect its computer network with ransomware and demanded US$28,000 payment in Bitcoins to get back online. The cyber-attack...

Cry Ransomware Using UDP, Imgur, Google Maps

Ransomware purporting to come from a phony government agency, something called the Central Security Treatment Organization, has been making the rounds, researchers say. The ransomware, which is already known by a number of names including Cry, CSTO ransomware, or Central Security Treatment...

New Ransomware KimcilWare Targets Magento Websites

New ransomware called KimcilWare is targeting websites running the Magento ecommerce platform, used by the likes of Vizio, Olympus and Nike. According to security experts from the online community BleepingComputer, hackers exploit vulnerabilities in the Magento ecommerce platform and install the...

Locky Ransomware Now Part Of Massive Spam Attack

Researchers are tracking a massive spam campaign pelting inboxes with Locky ransomware downloaders in the form of JavaScript attachments. The huge spike, reported by security firm Trustwave, represents an extraordinary uptick in the attempted distribution of the Locky ransomware. Trustwave said...

Disabled PadCrypt Ransomware Includes Live Chat, Uninstaller

Several flavors of ransomware, most notably Cryptowall, have come packaged with support features. But a new piece of crypto-ransomware called PadCrypt has upped the game with a live chat feature that victims can use to interact with the attackers about ransom payments and other information...

Meet The World's First Person Who Hacked His Body to Implant a Bitcoin Payment CHIP

Hackers are now going crazy and trying new ways in Biohacking. Until now, we have seen a hacker who implanted a small NFC chip in his hand in order to hack Android smartphones and bypass almost all security measures. However, now the level of craziness has gone to a whole new level. A Swedish...

Angler Exploit Kit Pushing New, Unnamed Ransomware

Attackers are using the infamous Angler exploit kit to disseminate a new, yet unnamed variant of the TeslaCrypt and AlphaCrypt ransomware, according to Rackspace security researcher Brad Duncan. Duncan analyzed the threat on the SANS Internet Storm Center, saying that the malware presents its...

Ransomware Looming As Major Long-Term Threat

On May 30, 2014, law enforcement officials from the FBI and Europol seized a series of servers that were being used to help operate the GameOver Zeus botnet, an especially pernicious and troublesome piece of malware. The authorities also began an international manhunt for a Russian man they said...

Microsoft Warns of Crowti Ransomware

Researchers with Microsoft have spotted a spike in Crowti, a ransomware similar to Cryptolocker that encrypts files on victims’ machines and then asks for payment to unlock them. The malware has existed for several months but it wasn’t until mid-October that Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center...

CryptoWall Ransomware Earns $1.1M, Encrypts 5 Billion Files

CryptoWall is a million-dollar business. The file-encrypting ransomware has netted the criminal gang responsible for its development and dispersal, more than $1.1 million in the six months it’s been in the wild, researchers at Dell SecureWorks’ Counter Threat Unit said in a report this week. The...