CoinVault Ransomware Authors Sentenced to 240 Hours of Community Service

Almost three years after the arrest of two young Dutch brothers, who pleaded guilty to their involvement in creating and distributing CoinVault ransomware malware , a district court in Rotterdam today sentenced them to 240 hours of community service. In 2015, the two suspects — Melvin 25-year-old...

COSCO’s American Operations Hit With Crippling Ransomware Attack

Shipping giant China Ocean Shipping Company COSCO has been hit with a ransomware attack that has crippled its U.S. operations. “Due to local network breakdown within our America regions, local email and network telephone cannot work properly at the moment. For safety precautions, we have shut dow...

New variant of Kronos banking trojan spotted using Tor network

By Waqas WannaCry ransomware hero is facing charges in the United States for developing Kronos banking trojan. In August 2017, Marcus Hutchins @MalwareTechBlog on Twitter aka WannaCry ransomware hero was arrested in the United States by the FBI and charged with playing a vital role in the...

A week in security (July 16 – July 22)

Last week on Labs, we looked at a Magniber expansion, explored open source vulnerabilities, and checked out the boons and drawbacks of smart assistants. We also continued our ad blocking article extravaganza, gave a whistlestop tour of third-party problems, and published our Q2 Cybercrime tactics...

Massive Malspam Campaign Finds a New Vector for FlawedAmmyy RAT

A widespread spam campaign from the well-known financial criminal group TA505 is spreading the FlawedAmmyy RAT using a brand-new vector: Weaponized PDFs containing malicious SettingContent-ms files. The SettingContent-ms file format was introduced in Windows 10; it allows a user to create...

Cybercrime tactics & techniques Q2 2018

A generally slow quarter reflects an overall lull in cybercrime, picking up where Q1 left off with cryptominers continuing to dominate, ransomware continuing to evolve through experimentation, and exploits making a small but significant comeback. In nearly every malware category for both business...

No Evidence of GandCrab Leveraging SMB Exploit – Yet

A new version of the evolving ransomware threat GandCrab has been identified by researchers – but evidence of the new malware self-propagating via the Windows transport protocol Server Message Block SMB exploit still remains to be seen. Security researchers at Fortinet said that they have spotted...

Magniber ransomware improves, expands within Asia

This blog post was authored by @hasherezade and Jérôme Segura. The Magnitude exploit kit is one of the longest-serving browser exploitation toolkits among those still in use. After its inception in 2013, it enjoyed worldwide distribution with a liking for ransomware. Eventually, it became a priva...

Threat Roundup for July 6-13

Today, as we do every week, Talos is giving you a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed this week — covering the dates between July 6 and 13. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed ...

Coinvault, the court case

Today, after almost 3 years of waiting, it was finally the day of the trial. In the Netherlands, where the whole case took place, the hearings are open to the public. Meaning anyone who is interested can visit. And it was quite busy. Because besides the suspects, their lawyers, the judges and the...

Partner Perspectives: Containing and Recovering from Incidents with the Help of Minerva Labs and Carbon Black

Lenny Zeltser is a VP of Products at Minerva Labs, as well as an author and instructor at SANS Institute. Despite their efforts to prevent intrusions, enterprises can still face large-scale compromises. When organizations discover numerous endpoints infected with malicious code, how can responder...

Organizations Leave Backdoors Open to Cheap Remote Desktop Protocol Attacks

ARCHIVED STORY Organizations Leave Backdoors Open to Cheap Remote Desktop Protocol Attacks By John Fokker · July 11, 2018 Thanks to my colleague Christiaan Beek for his advice and contributions. While researching underground hacker marketplaces, the McAfee Advanced Threat Research team has...

Carbon Black TAU Threat Analysis: Recent Dharma Ransomware Highlights Attackers’ Continued Use of Open-Source Tools

In June of 2018, an organization contacted the Carbon Black Threat Analysis Unit TAU about a ransomware attack they were currently investigating. TAU team members worked with the firm investigating the incident. After the initial analysis was completed, it became apparent that this network had be...

Keeping False Positives in Check

In 2017, seven out of ten organizations said their security risks increased significantly, according to a Ponemon Institute study. This is no surprise given that last year organizations suffered the largest ransomware outbreak in history WannaCry and vulnerabilities such as Meltdown and Spectre...

This Week in Security News: Security and Safety on Social Media

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, California lawmakers passed a new online privacy bill guaranteeing more control over user data. Also, Typeform announced a breach involving...

Threat Roundup for June 29 to July 6th

Today, as we do every week, Talos is giving you a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed this week — covering the dates between June 29 and July 6. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, it will summarize the threats we've observed by...

Cloud Security For The Healthcare Industry: A No-Brainer

The healthcare industry has become one of the likeliest to suffer cyber-attacks, and there’s little wonder why. Having the financial and personal information of scores of patients makes it a very appetizing target for attackers. Just over a year ago, the WannaCry ransomware attack wreaked havoc o...

ThreatList: Biggest Cybercrime Developments in 2018, So Far

Despite several successful crackdowns on several cybercriminal underworld gangs, miscreants have been highly active during the first half of 2018, according Flashpoint. According to Flashpoint’s mid-year Business Risk Intelligence report, released last month, the major developments in the...

New Virus Decides If Your Computer Good for Mining or Ransomware

Security researchers have discovered an interesting piece of malware that infects systems with either a cryptocurrency miner or ransomware, depending upon their configurations to decide which of the two schemes could be more profitable. While ransomware is a type of malware that locks your comput...

New Virus Decides If Your Computer Good for Mining or Ransomware

Security researchers have discovered an interesting piece of malware that infects systems with either a cryptocurrency miner or ransomware, depending upon their configurations to decide which of the two schemes could be more profitable. While ransomware is a type of malware that locks your comput...