Botnet Tweeting, Spamming Porn Shut Down

An adult-themed botnet was found by researchers and dismantled by Twitter last month. The Twitter-based botnet consisted of 86,262 bot accounts, and over the past six months blasted out 8.6 million tweets that attempted to lure males to pornographic, dating, hookup and cheating-spouse websites...

Porn Spam Botnet Has Evil Twitter Twin

Last month KrebsOnSecurity published research into a large distributed network of apparently compromised systems being used to relay huge blasts of junk email promoting "online dating" programs -- affiliate-driven schemes traditionally overrun with automated accounts posing as women. New research...

New Point-of-Sale Malware LockPoS Hitches Ride with FlokiBot

Botnets distributing FlokiBot point-of-sale malware have awoken from months of slumber and are back in business spewing a new malware dubbed LockPoS. Researchers say the malware is still flying under the radar of many antivirus and intrusion detection systems because it’s so new. Currently, LockP...

IoT Malware Activity Already More Than Doubled 2016 Numbers

The number of new malware samples in the wild this year targeting connected internet-of-things IoT devices has already more than doubled last year’s total. Honeypots laid out by Kaspersky Lab researchers mimicking a number of connected devices running Linux have attracted more than 7,200 differen...

Honeypots and the Internet of Things

There were a number of incidents in 2016 that triggered increased interest in the security of so-called IoT or 'smart' devices. They included, among others, the record-breaking DDoS attacks against the French hosting provider OVH and the US DNS provider Dyn. These attacks are known to have been...

Inside a Porn-Pimping Spam Botnet

For several months I've been poking at a decent-sized spam botnet that appears to be used mainly for promoting adult dating sites. Having hit a wall in my research, I decided it might be good to publish what I've unearthed so far to see if this dovetails with any other research out there. In late...

Jaff Ransomware Decryption Tool Released – Don't Pay, Unlock Files for Free

Hit by Jaff Ransomware? Don't pay the Ransom. You can unlock your files for Free! Kaspersky Labs has released an updated version 1.21.2.1 of its free ransomware decryption tool, RakhniDecryptor, which can now also decrypt files locked by the Jaff ransomware. Security researchers at Kaspersky Labs...

Decryption Utility Unlocks Files Encrypted by Jaff Ransomware

A weakness discovered in Jaff ransomware by researchers has led to the creation of decryption keys to unlock files locked by the malware. “We have found a vulnerability in Jaff’s code for all the variants to date. Thanks to this, it is now possible to recover users’ files encrypted with the .jaff...

DHS, FBI Warn of North Korea 'Hidden Cobra' Strikes Against US Assets

United States top cybersecurity cops warned Tuesday that North Korean government threat actors are targeting U.S. businesses with malware and botnet-related attacks that are part of concerted effort dubbed “Hidden Cobra.” According to a United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team US-CERT...

US Warns of 'DeltaCharlie' – A North Korean DDoS Botnet Malware

The United States government has released a rare alert about an ongoing, eight-year-long North Korean state-sponsored hacking operation. The joint report from the FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security DHS provided details on "DeltaCharlie," a malware variant used by "Hidden Cobra" hacking...

Jaff Malware Probe Uncovers Link to Cybercrime Marketplace

An investigation into a new strain of Jaff ransomware uncovered a shared backend infrastructure between the malware and a black market bazaar selling stolen bank and credit card account information. Researchers at Heimdal Security said the cybercrime marketplace they found appeared mature, offeri...

Hackers Are Trying to Reignite WannaCry With Nonstop Botnet Attacks

The "sinkhole" domain that's held the ransomware in check is coming under repeated denial-of-service attacks. The post Hackers Are Trying to Reignite WannaCry With Nonstop Botnet Attacks appeared first on WIRED...

More Hacking Groups Found Exploiting SMB Flaw Weeks Before WannaCry

Since the Shadow Brokers released the zero-day software vulnerabilities and hacking tools – allegedly belonged to the NSA's elite hacking team Equation Group – several hacking groups and individual hackers have started using them in their own way. The April's data dump was believed to be the most...

Do you think web passwords are the weakest link in security? Indeed they are.

Between 500K and 500M sets of credentials have been compromised over the recent years, according to various sources. Just last week, a compromise of an educational service Edmondo has been reported to expose as many as 78M user accounts. At the same time, individual users are exposed to so many...

Weeks Before WannaCry, Cryptocurrency Mining Botnet Was Using Windows SMB Exploit

A security researcher has just discovered a stealthy cryptocurrency-mining malware that was also using Windows SMB vulnerability at least two weeks before the outbreak of WannaCry ransomware attacks. According to Kafeine, a security researcher at Proofpoint, another group of cyber criminals was...

New Jaff Ransomware Part Of Active Necurs Spam Blitz

A new malware family called Jaff has been identified by researchers who say they are currently tracking multiple massive spam campaigns distributing the malware via the Necurs botnet. “It came out of nowhere with a huge bang,” Cisco Talos researchers said Friday In the last 24 hours, the firm has...

This Week in Security News

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. Below you’ll find a quick recap of topics followed by links to news articles and/or our blog posts providing additional insight. Be sure to check back...

Botnet Sending 5 Million Emails Per Hour to Spread Jaff Ransomware

A massive malicious email campaign that stems from the Necurs botnet is spreading a new ransomware at the rate of 5 million emails per hour and hitting computers across the globe. Dubbed "Jaff," the new file-encrypting ransomware is very similar to the infamous Locky ransomware in many ways, but ...

The Bondnet Army: Questions & Answers

The following is a select list of questions and answers that we hope will shed more light on the botnet...

An Army of Thousands of Hacked Servers Found Mining Cryptocurrencies

A new botnet consisting of more than 15,000 compromised servers has been used to mine various cryptocurrencies, earning its master around $25,000 per month. Mining cryptocurrencies can be a costly investment, as it requires an enormous amount of computing power, but cybercriminals have found an...