Phorpiex Botnet Shifts Gears From Ransomware to Sextortion

A recent wide-scale campaign indicates that a decade-old botnet is shifting gears from distributing ransomware to delivering millions of sextortion threats to innocent recipients. Worse, researchers say that the botnet’s spam campaign can affect up to 27 million potential victims. The botnet,...

10 Steps for Ransomware Protection

Just the thought of ransomware is enough to keep CISOs and security teams up at night. Victims are caught in an awful choice between paying a ransom to a criminal who may or may not release their captured network and data, or potentially spending millions of dollars to remove the ransomware on...

Guarding against supply chain attacks—Part 1: The big picture

Every day, somewhere in the world, governments, businesses, educational organizations, and individuals are hacked. Precious data is stolen or held for ransom, and the wheels of “business-as-usual” grind to a halt. These criminal acts are expected to cost more than $2 trillion in 2019, a four-fold...

Docker Containers Riddled with Graboid Crypto-Worm

The Docker cloud containerization technology is the target for a just-discovered cryptojacking worm dubbed Graboid. According to researchers at Palo Alto’s Unit 42, the worm, which looks to mine the Monero cryptocurrency, has infected more than 2,000 unsecured Docker Engine Community Edition host...

Cybercrime Tool Prices Bump Up in Dark Web Markets

Prices have been rising in the last two years for longstanding tools available on the Dark Web to help bad actors commit cyber attacks and fraud, alongside newer innovations that are emerging to bolster crimes like ransomware and SIM swapping, new research has found. Keeping track of these trends...

Pitney Bowes Hit with Ransomware Attack

Shipping services company Pitney Bowes was hit with a ransomware attack that disrupted customer access to key services, the company said Monday. The attack comes on the heels of an FBI advisory on Oct. 2 that U.S. companies should be on alert for ransomware attacks, which are increasing in...

Europol: Ransomware remains top threat in IOCTA report

The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, or Europol, just released its annual Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment IOCTA report for the year. And we weren’t surprised to find that ransomware, despite its palpable decline in volume these past few months—a trend we’ve also...

McAfee ATR Analyzes Sodinokibi aka REvil Ransomware-as-a-Service – Follow The Money

ARCHIVED STORY McAfee ATR Analyzes Sodinokibi aka REvil Ransomware-as-a-Service – Follow The Money By John Fokker · October 14, 2019 Episode 3: Follow the Money This is the third installment of the McAfee Advanced Threat Research ATR analysis of Sodinokibi and its connections to GandCrab, the mos...

McAfee ATR Analyzes Sodinokibi aka REvil Ransomware-as-a-Service – Follow The Money

ARCHIVED STORY McAfee ATR Analyzes Sodinokibi aka REvil Ransomware-as-a-Service – Follow The Money By John Fokker · October 14, 2019 Episode 3: Follow the Money This is the third installment of the McAfee Advanced Threat Research ATR analysis of Sodinokibi and its connections to GandCrab, the mos...

An iTunes Bug Let Hackers Spread Ransomware

FBI overreach, hacker payback, and more of the week's top security news...

Securing the managed service provider (MSP)

Managed service providers MSPs have been a boon to midsize enterprise. They allow for offloading technical debt to an agent with the skills and resources to manage it, thereby giving an organization room to focus on growing a business, rather than the particulars of infrastructure. For a long...

Apple iTunes and iCloud for Windows 0-Day Exploited in Ransomware Attacks

Watch out Windows users! The cybercriminal group behind BitPaymer and iEncrypt ransomware attacks has been found exploiting a zero-day vulnerability affecting a little-known component that comes bundled with Apple's iTunes and iCloud software for Windows to evade antivirus detection. The vulnerab...

Apple iTunes and iCloud for Windows 0-Day Exploited in Ransomware Attacks

Watch out Windows users! The cybercriminal group behind BitPaymer and iEncrypt ransomware attacks has been found exploiting a zero-day vulnerability affecting a little-known component that comes bundled with Apple's iTunes and iCloud software for Windows to evade antivirus detection. The vulnerab...

Cyber insurance: here to stay, whether we like it or not

Cyber insurance has been a big talking point in infosec circles for many months now. We’ve mentioned it in passing ourselves a few times, usually in relation to ransomware attacks. This isn’t surprising; ransomware may not be the threat that brought cyber insurance to life, but it absolutely help...

Apple iTunes Bug Actively Exploited in BitPaymer/iEncrypt Campaign

Bad actors are actively targeting a vulnerability in the Windows version of Apple iTunes to deliver BitPaymer/iEncrypt ransomware. It’s a new attack pattern that is difficult to detect, security researchers revealed Thursday. Researchers from Morphisec Labs in August identified the abuse of the...

Programmer hacks his attacker; releases decryption keys for Mushtik ransomware

By Sudais "Hey guys, I hacked back this criminal and got the whole database with Mushtik ransomware keys." The last laugh - it's something that everyone would like to have. Turns out, a German programmer by the name of Tobias Fromel had it in a very dramatic fashion. It all started when he was...

Explained: war shipping

Yesterday, Mike from the mailroom came up and asked whether I knew anyone called “Simon Smith.” He received an envelope addressed to our company and to the attention of Mr. Smith, but there was no one by that name on his list of employees. It wasn’t on mine either and HR was unaware of a person b...

How to avoid getting caught in a “Groundhog Day” loop of security issues

It’s Cyber Security Awareness Month and it made me think about one of my favorite movies, called Groundhog Day. Have you ever seen it? Bill Murray is the cynical weatherman, Phil Connors, who gets stuck in an endless loop where he repeats the same day over and over again until he “participates in...

Using MixMode and Carbon Black to Spot a Watering Hole Attack

For those not familiar with watering hole attacks, they are attacks on a specific place—such as a restaurant—that many people visit. They generally involve malicious code being injected into an iframe on the company’s website. In the case of a restaurant, for example, the online menu would be a...

Alabama Hospitals Pay Up in Ransomware Attack

An Alabama hospital system has paid its attackers in a ransomware attack that knocked its systems offline on Oct. 1. Officials at the DCH Health System didn’t say how much the hospitals paid for the decryption key, but noted that they have started a “methodical” process of system restoration. “We...