The US Offers a $10M Bounty for Intel on Conti Ransomware Gang

The State Department organization has called for people to share details about five key members of the hacking group...

Ransomware review: July 2022

Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence builds a monthly picture of ransomware activity by monitoring the information published by ransomware gangs on their Dark Web leak sites. This information represents victims who were successfully attacked but opted not to pay a ransom. In July, LockBit maintained...

Ransomware review: July 2022

Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence builds a monthly picture of ransomware activity by monitoring the information published by ransomware gangs on their Dark Web leak sites. This information represents victims who were successfully attacked but opted not to pay a ransom. In July, LockBit maintained...

To Maze and Beyond: How the Ransomware Double Extortion Space Has Evolved

We're here with the final installment in our Pain Points: Ransomware Data Disclosure Trends report blog series, and today we're looking at a unique aspect of the report that clarifies not just what ransomware actors choose to disclose, but who discloses what, and how the ransomware landscape has...

Microsoft Adds Default Protection Against RDP Brute-Force Attacks in Windows 11

Microsoft is now taking steps to prevent Remote Desktop Protocol RDP brute-force attacks as part of the latest builds for the Windows 11 operating system in an attempt to raise the security baseline to meet the evolving threat landscape. To that end, the default policy for Windows 11 builds –...

Conti’s Reign of Chaos: Costa Rica in the Crosshairs

Any time conflict erupts, people tend to take sides, even when it comes to cybercrime. Since the beginning of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war, some bad actors have made their alliances known publicly. The Conti Ransomware-as-a-Service RaaS group is one of the most notable – declaring in Februar...

TrickBot Gang Shifted its Focus on "Systematically" Targeting Ukraine

In what's being described as an "unprecedented" twist, the operators of the TrickBot malware have resorted to systematically targeting Ukraine since the onset of the war in late February 2022. The group is believed to have orchestrated at least six phishing campaigns aimed at targets that align...

Ransomware review: June 2022

Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence builds a monthly picture of ransomware activity by monitoring the information published by ransomware gangs on their Dark Web leak sites. This information represents victims who were successfully attacked but opted not to pay a ransom. In June, LockBit was the mos...

Cybersecurity Experts Warn of Emerging Threat of "Black Basta" Ransomware

The Black Basta ransomware-as-a-service RaaS syndicate has amassed nearly 50 victims in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand within two months of its emergence in the wild, making it a prominent threat in a short window. "Black Basta has been observed targeting a range of...

Conti vs. LockBit: A Comparative Analysis of Ransomware Groups

We compare the targeting and business models of the Conti and LockBit ransomware groups using data analysis approaches. This will be presented in full at the 34th Annual FIRST Conference on June 27, 2022...

Conti ransomware group’s pulse stops, but did it fake its own death?

The dark web leak site used by the notorious Conti ransomware gang has disappeared, along with the chat function it used to negotiate ransoms with victims. For as long as this infrastructure is down the group is unable to operate and a significent threat is removed from the pantheon of ransomware...

Karakurt extortion group: Threat profile

The FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation, together with CISA Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other federal agencies, recently released a joint cybersecurity advisory CSA about the Karakurt data extortion group also known as Karakurt Team and Karakurt Lair. Like RansomHouse,...

Hacking Scenarios: How Hackers Choose Their Victims

Enforcing the "double-extortion" technique aka pay-now-or-get-breached emerged as a head-turner last year. May 6th, 2022 is a recent example. The State Department said the Conti strain of ransomware was the most costly in terms of payments made by victims as of January. Conti, a...

Ransomware: May 2022 review

The Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence team monitors the threat landscape continuously and produces monthly ransomware reports based on a mixture of proprietary and open-source intelligence. Conti sleight of hand? Although LockBit remained the most widely-deployed ransomware in May 2022, it was,...

Conti Leaks Reveal Ransomware Gang's Interest in Firmware-based Attacks

An analysis of leaked chats from the notorious Conti ransomware group earlier this year has revealed that the syndicate has been working on a set of firmware attack techniques that could offer a path to accessing privileged code on compromised devices. "Control over firmware gives attackers...

Using Python to unearth a goldmine of threat intelligence from leaked chat logs

Dealing with a great amount of data can be time consuming, thus using Python can be very powerful to help analysts sort information and extract the most relevant data for their investigation. The open-source tools library, MSTICPy, for example, is a Python tool dedicated to threat intelligence. I...

Using Python to unearth a goldmine of threat intelligence from leaked chat logs

Dealing with a great amount of data can be time consuming, thus using Python can be very powerful to help analysts sort information and extract the most relevant data for their investigation. The open-source tools library, MSTICPy, for example, is a Python tool dedicated to threat intelligence. I...

Conti Ransomware Operation Shut Down After Splitting into Smaller Groups

Even as the operators of Conti threatened to overthrow the Costa Rican government, the notorious cybercrime gang officially took down its attack infrastructure in favor of migrating their malicious cyber activities to other ancillary operations, including Karakurt and BlackByte. "From the...

North Korean IT Workers Are Infiltrating Tech Companies

Plus: The Conti ransomware gang shuts down, Canada bans Huawei and ZTE, and more of the week’s top security news...

Researchers Expose Inner Workings of Billion-Dollar Wizard Spider Cybercrime Gang

The inner workings of a cybercriminal group known as the Wizard Spider have been exposed, shedding light on its organizational structure and motivations. "Most of Wizard Spider's efforts go into hacking European and U.S. businesses, with a special cracking tool used by some of their attackers to...