Deleted Facebook Cybercrime Groups Had 300,000 Members

Hours after being alerted by KrebsOnSecurity, Facebook last week deleted almost 120 private discussion groups totaling more than 300,000 members who flagrantly promoted a host of illicit activities on the social media network's platform. The scam groups facilitated a broad spectrum of shady...

Mirai Variant Targets Financial Sector With IoT DDoS Attacks

A variant of the Mirai botnet was used to launch a series of distributed denial of service campaigns against financial sector businesses. The attacks utilized at least 13,000 hijacked IoT devices generating traffic volumes up to 30 Gbps, considerably less intense than the original Mirai assaults...

A Mirai Botnet Postscript: Lessons Learned

The fall 2016 Mirai botnet compromised more than 300,000 IoT devices as part of a massive DDoS attack. After the crippling attack, Flashpoint and Akamai worked together with law enforcement to help bring those behind the botnet attack to justice. Threatpost’s Tom Spring sits down with Flashpoint’...

Pre-Installed Malware Found On 5 Million Popular Android Phones

Security researchers have discovered a massive continuously growing malware campaign that has already infected nearly 5 million mobile devices worldwide. Dubbed RottenSys, the malware that disguised as a 'System Wi-Fi service' app came pre-installed on millions of brand new smartphones manufactur...

Gozi ISFB Remains Active in 2018, Leverages "Dark Cloud" Botnet For Distribution

This blog post was authored by Edmund Brumaghin and Holger Unterbrink, with contributions from Adam Weller. Executive Summary Gozi ISFB is a well-known and widely distributed banking trojan, and has been in the threat landscape for the past several years. Banking trojans are a type of malware tha...

Cryptomining Gold Rush: One Gang Rakes In $7M Over 6 Months

The bloom is on the criminal cryptomining of computer resources and the reason is obvious – it’s lucrative. One cryptomining gang tracked by researchers over the past six months minted $7 million with the help of 10,000 computers infected with mining malware. The rise of malicious cryptomining...

Financial Cyberthreats in 2017

In 2017, we saw a number of changes to the world of financial threats and new actors emerging. As we have previously noted, fraud attacks in financial services have become increasingly account-centric. User data is a key enabler for large-scale fraud attacks, and frequent data breaches - among...

New Research: Crypto-mining Drives Almost 90% of All Remote Code Execution Attacks

It’s early in 2018 and we have already witnessed one of the top contenders in this year’s web application attacks. Continuing the trend from the last months of 2017, crypto-mining malware is quickly becoming attackers’ favorite modus operandi. In December 2017, 88 percent of all remote code...

New IoT Botnet DoubleDoor Bypass Firewall to Drop Backdoor

By Waqas A new Internet of Things IoT botnet campaign dubbed as This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: New IoT Botnet DoubleDoor Bypass Firewall to Drop Backdoor...

Humans, Machines and Data: Fighting Mirai, Together

By Yohai Einav, Hongliang Liu Background It's been 18 months since Mirai entered our lives, and, unfortunately, we expect it to have a perennial presence in our cyber-world for years to come. If we look at the big picture, all indicators suggest that the Mirai problem and its descendants is just...

Romance Scams Drive Necurs Botnet Activity in Run Up to Valentine’s Day

Necurs botnet activity is spiking as scammers use the network to flood inboxes with promises of companionship, in part of a seasonal wave of Valentine’s Day-themed spam. Victims are encouraged to share revealing photos of themselves, which scammers later use as leverage in extortion shakedowns. T...

U.K. and U.S. Government Websites Among Thousands Infected by Cryptocurrency Miner

More than 4,200 websites, including many run the U.K. and U.S. governments, were infected on Feb. 11 by a Monero cryptocurrency miner delivered through Browsealoud, a hosted accessibility service that can read website content aloud for people with visual impairments. Browsealoud developer Texthel...

This Week in Security News: Botnets and Breaches

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, North Korean hackers overtook Adobe, Trend Micro Safety Solutions discovered new a botnet, and the threat of third-party cyber breaches made...

Watch Out! New Cryptocurrency-Mining Android Malware is Spreading Rapidly

Due to the recent surge in cryptocurrency prices, threat actors are increasingly targeting every platform, including IoT, Android, and Windows, with malware that leverages the CPU power of victims' devices to mine cryptocurrency. Just last month, Kaspersky researchers spotted fake antivirus and...

DDoS attacks in Q4 2017

News overview In terms of news about DDoS attacks, the last quarter of 2017 was livelier than the previous one. Some major botnets were discovered and destroyed. For instance, early December saw the FBI, Microsoft, and Europol team up to knock out the Andromeda botnet, in operation since 2011. In...

Alleged Spam Kingpin ‘Severa’ Extradited to US

Peter Yuryevich Levashov, a 37-year-old Russian computer programmer thought to be one of the world's most notorious spam kingpins, has been extradited to the United States to face federal hacking and spamming charges. Levashov, in an undated photo. Levashov, who allegedly went by the hacker names...

New Monero Crypto Mining Botnet Leverages Android Debugging Tool

A new botnet that distributes malware for mining Monero cryptocurrency has emerged, infecting Android devices through a port linked with a debugging tool for the OS, according to researchers at Qihoo 360 Netlab. Dubbed ADB.Miner by 360 Netlab, the botnet is gaining entry to Android devices–mostly...

JenX Botnet Has Grand Theft Auto Hook

Researchers at Radware have discovered a new botnet that uses vulnerabilities linked with the Satori botnet and is leveraging the Grand Theft Auto videogame community to infect IoT devices. Satori is a derivative of Mirai, the notorious botnet that in 2016 infamously managed to take down Dyn, a D...

Crypto Miners May Be the ‘New Payload of Choice’ for Attackers

Ransomware has been a favorite and time-tested tool for cybercriminals, but the rise of cryptocurrency has given them a broad new target with key strategic advantages, leading to a sharp uptick in crypto mining botnets, researchers at Cisco Talos say. Attackers “are beginning to recognize that th...

Massive Smominru Cryptocurrency Botnet Rakes In Millions

Criminals behind the cryptocurrency miner Smominru have raked in between $2.8 to $3.6 million since May. The payday is impressive, say researchers at Proofpoint, who report that operators have amassed a formidable botnet of infected servers pumping out 24 Monero daily, or the equivalent of $8,500...