How Just Opening an MS Word Doc Can Hijack Every File On Your System

If you receive a mail masquerading as a company's invoice and containing a Microsoft Word file, think twice before clicking on it. Doing so could cripple your system and could lead to a catastrophic destruction. Hackers are believed to be carrying out social engineering hoaxes by adopting...

Hollywood Hospital Pays $17K Ransom to Decrypt Files

After being knocked offline for nearly two weeks, officials at a California hospital that was hit with ransomware elected on Wednesday to pay attackers. The Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center HPMC shut down computers on its network on Feb. 5, after attackers allegedly asked for 9,000 Bitcoin, ...

Locky Ransomware Borrows Tricks from Dridex

It’s been difficult to keep track of all the different strains of ransomware that have plagued users over the last year or two. Unlike many of them the latest to grab headlines is spreading through a decidedly old school vector: document-based macros. Named Locky, the ransomware appears to borrow...

Hollywood Hospital Pays $17,000 Ransom to Hacker for Unlocking Medical Records

Ransomware has seriously turned on to a noxious game of Hackers to get paid effortlessly. Once again the heat was felt by the Los Angeles-based Presbyterian Medical Center when a group of hackers had sealed all its sensitive files and demanded $17,000 USD to regain the access to those compromised...

Disabled PadCrypt Ransomware Includes Live Chat, Uninstaller

Several flavors of ransomware, most notably Cryptowall, have come packaged with support features. But a new piece of crypto-ransomware called PadCrypt has upped the game with a live chat feature that victims can use to interact with the attackers about ransom payments and other information...

Here's How to Decrypt Hydracrypt & Umbrecrypt Ransomware Files

Over the last few years, we have seen several types of Ransomware malware that demand a whopping amount of money from users for the retrieval of their locked, compromised sensitive files. We have also witnessed the birth of decryption solution for some of the Ransomware like Cryptolocker partial,...

Carbanak 2.0, Metel, GCMAN Borrow from APT Attacks

TENERIFE, Spain— Many bank robbers long ago dropped the stick-up man persona in favor of a keyboard and a reliable password-stealing Trojan. Banking malware, however, may soon not be good enough for the bad guys. More and more are copycatting the techniques deployed by advanced hackers to steal...

WordPress Compromises Lead to Teslacrypt Ransoware

Website operators running sites on the WordPress platform need to be aware of a massive string of infections that as of Thursday were poorly detected by security products. Researchers at Heimdal Security said the compromised sites redirect victims to other domains hosting the Nuclear Exploit Kit,...

On BlackEnergy, Ransomware Hitting an Israeli Energy Consortium, Amazon as a CA, and More

Mike Mimoso and Chris Brook discuss the news of the week, including the latest on the BlackEnergy APT Group, Amazon getting into the SSL certificate game, and government agencies being told to audit their systems for the Juniper backdoor. Download: ThreatpostNewsWrapJanuary292016.mp3 Music by Chr...

Israeli Electric Authority Attacked, Potential Ransomware

Earlier this week Israel’s Electric Authority mitigated what officials there are calling a “severe cyber attack.” The Electric Authority is in charge of regulating and overseeing the distribution of electricity in Israel. The State of Israel’s National Infrastructure, Energy and Water Resources...

CVE-2016-0575

CVE-2016-0575 concerns an unspecified vulnerability in the Oracle Learning Management OTA Self Service component of Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10.2. Per NVD and CNVD entries, a remote attacker could affect integrity via OTA Self Service, potentially allowing data modification. The root cause is...

EPIC Fail — For the Third Time, Linux Ransomware CRACKED!

Ransomware is now a common practice for money-motivated cyber criminals. It's basically a type of software written in any system-based programming language that has the ability to hijack victim’s computer, encrypts files and then ask for a ransom amount to get them back. One such ransomware dubbe...

Ransom32 Ransomware-As-A-Service Written in JavaScript

Crimeware services are nothing new. Criminals for years have advertised on the underground not only malware, but management services and support for banking Trojans, exploit kits and more. Researchers this week turned up a new ransomware-as-a-service operation that pushes the first ransomware cod...

Ransom32 — First JavaScript-powered Ransomware affecting Windows, Mac and Linux

Here's New Year's first Ransomware: Ransom32. A new Ransomware-as-a-service, dubbed Ransom32, has been spotted that for the first time uses a ransomware written in JavaScript to infect Mac, Windows as well as Linux machines. Ransom32 allows its operators to deploy the malware very quickly and...

Mike Mimoso and Chris Brook Discuss the Threats of 2015

With 2015 more or less in the rear view mirror Mike Mimoso and Chris Brook discuss the year in security: Wassenaar, ransomware, Carbanak and Equation Group,how big of a deal Stagefright was, that Juniper backdoor, and more. Download: tp2015inreview.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves...

ALERT: This New Ransomware Steals Passwords Before Encrypting Files

You should be very careful while visiting websites on the Internet because you could be hit by a new upgrade to the World's worst Exploit Kit – Angler, which lets hackers develop and conduct their own drive-by attacks on visitors' computers with relative ease. Many poorly-secured websites are...

Angler Exploit Kit Spreading Cryptowall 4.0

As expected, it didn’t take long for one of the most popular exploit kits, Angler, to start spreading the latest iteration of Cryptowall ransomware. A drive-by campaign that uses a one-two punch to drop Cryptowall 4.0 has been observed in the wild this week, according to researchers at Heimdal...

Hackers are using Nuclear Exploit Kit to Spread Cryptowall 4.0 Ransomware

Beware Internet Users! Cryptowall 4.0 – the newest version of the world's worst Ransomware – has surfaced in the Nuclear exploit kit, one of the most potent exploit kits available in the underground market for hacking into computers. Ransomware threat has emerged as one of the biggest threats to...

Nuclear Exploit Kit Spreading Cryptowall 4.0 Ransomware

In short order, the newest version of Cryptowall has begun showing up in exploit kits. The SANS Internet Storm Center said on Tuesday that an attacker working off domains belonging to Chinese registrar BizCN has been moving the ransomware via the Nuclear Exploit Kit. SANS ISC handler and Rackspac...

Chimera Ransomware Operation Shut Down

It seems that as quickly as the Chimera ransomware surfaced, the operation has been shut down. Researchers at Bleeping Computer said Tuesday that the malware was no longer active. A number of security companies were publishing alerts about this latest strain of crypto-ransomware, which was...