No More Ransom — 15 New Ransomware Decryption Tools Available for Free

No More Ransom, so is the Ransomware Threat. Launched less than a year ago, the No More Ransom NMR project has increased its capacity with new partners and new decryption tools added to its now global campaign to combat Ransomware. Started as a joint initiative by Europol, the Dutch National...

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...

Police Arrest Man Potentially Linked to Group Threatening to Wipe Millions Of iPhones

The British authority has reportedly arrested a 20-years-old young man – potentially one of the member of a cyber criminal gang 'Turkish Crime Family' who threatened Apple last week to remotely wipe data from millions of iOS devices unless Apple pays a ransom of $75,000. The UK's National Crime...

Experts Doubt Hacker's Claim Of Millions Of Breached Apple Credentials

Security experts say they are skeptical that a group of hackers called Turkish Crime Family actually possess a cache of hundreds of millions of Apple iCloud account credentials. A more plausible explanation, they say, is that crooks used credential stuffing attacks to amass a limited number of...

Hackers Threaten to Remotely Wipe 300 Million iPhones Unless Apple Pays Ransom

If you use iCloud to sync your Apple devices, your private data may be at risk of getting exposed or deleted by April 7th. It has been found that a mischievous group of hackers claiming to have access to over 300 million iCloud accounts is threatening Apple to remotely wipe data from those millio...

CloudPets Notifies California AG of Data Breach

Spiral Toys, the parent company behind CloudPets, yesterday sent the California Attorney General a breach notification that on many fronts contradicts what experts have said about a database breach that exposed user data and private voice messages, many of which were made by children. The...

Children's Voice Messages Leaked in CloudPets Database Breach

More than two million voice messages, many of them from children, along with the personal information of more than 800,000 registered users was swiped from an exposed MongoDB instance storing data collected from a internet-connected toy called CloudPets. These IP-enabled teddy bears allow childre...

Internet-Connected Teddy Bear Leaks Millions Of Voice Messages and Password

Every parent should think twice before handing out Internet-connected toys or smart toys to their children, as these creepy toys pose a different sort of danger: privacy and data security risks for kids who play with them. This same incident was happened over a year ago when Hong Kong toymaker...

Open Databases a Juicy Extortion Target

Recent attacks against insecure MongoDB, Hadoop and CouchDB installations represent a new phase in online extortion, born from ransomware’s roots with the promise of becoming a nemesis for years to come. “These types of attacks have grown from ones of opportunity to full-scale automated and...

Over 70% of Washington DC's CCTV Were Hacked Before Trump Inauguration

Just days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, cyber criminals infected 70 percent of storage devices that record data from feds surveillance cameras in Washington D.C. in a cyber attack. Any guess, What kind of virus could have hit the storage devices? Once again, the culprit is...

Ransomware Hijacks Hotel Smart Keys to Lock Guests Out of their Rooms

What's the worst that could happen when a Ransomware hits a Hotel? Recently, hundreds of guests of a luxurious hotel in Austria were locked in or out of their rooms when ransomware hit the hotel's IT system, and the hotel had no choice left except paying the attackers. Today, we are living in a...

Hadoop, CouchDB Next Targets in Wave of Database Attacks

Insecure Hadoop and CouchDB installations are the latest targets of cybercriminals who are hijacking and deleting data. Last week, security researchers said 28,000 MongoDB and Elasticsearch installations were hacked in a new wave of attacks against unprotected open source data management platform...

Protect your data from ransom attacks

I wanted to bring attention to two blog posts we have done recently in response to the recent set of data ransom attacks affecting Elasticsearch and other systems. The two are: For Elasticsearch: Protecting Against Attacks that Hold Your Data for Ransom For Kibana: Guarding Kibana from Data...

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...

MongoDB Attacks Jump From Hundreds to 28,000 In Just Days

Security researchers report a massive uptick in the number of MongoDB databases hijacked and held for ransom. On Monday, researcher Niall Merrigan reported 28,000 misconfigured MongoDB were attacked by more than a dozen hacker groups. That’s sharp increase from last week when 2,000 MongoDB had be...

Hello Kitty Database of 3.3 Million Users Surfaces

A cache of data including 3.3 million user credentials belonging to Hello Kitty parent company Sanrio surfaced over the weekend. The breach was originally reported in December 2015, but at the time Sanrio denied any data was stolen as part of the breach. The breach was tied to a misconfigured...

Over 27,000 MongoDB Databases Held For Ransom Within A Week

The ransomware attacks on poorly secured MongoDB installations have doubled in just a day. A hacker going by the handle Harak1r1 is accessing, copying and deleting unpatched or badly-configured MongoDB databases and then threatening administrators to ransom in exchange of the lost data. It all...

Attacks On MongoDB Rise As Hijackings Continue

The number of insecure MongoDB databases being hijacked by criminals is growing according to experts who say attacks that began last week are now targeting more valuable assets. Since identifying attacks against MongoDB installations on Dec. 27, Victor Gevers, an ethical hacker and founder of GDI...

New Decryptor Unlocks CryptXXX v3 Files

Researchers have neutralized the threat of the latest strain of the CryptXXX v.3 ransomware, releasing a decryption tool for unlocking files, and have added it to the RannohDecryptor, a free utility hosted by Kaspersky Lab’s No Ransom Project. Previous decryption tools had been available for...

Fake fax ushers in revival of a ransomware family

Note: Read our latest comprehensive report on ransomware: Ransomware 1H 2017 review: Global outbreaks reinforce the value of security hygiene. "Criminal case against you" is a message that may understandably cause panic. That’s what a recent spam campaign hopes happens, increasing the likelihood ...