Check your passwords! Synology NAS devices under attack from StealthWorker

Synology PSIRT Product Security Incident Response Team has put out a warning that it has recently seen and received reports about an increase in brute-force attacks against Synology devices. PSIRT suspects the botnet commonly known as StealthWorker is responsible for this increase in activity...

EINSTEIN Data Trends – 30-day Lookback

Summary Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA analysts have compiled the top detection signatures that have been the most active over the month of May in our national Intrusion Detection System IDS, known as EINSTEIN. This information is meant to give the reader a closer look into...

Divergent: "Fileless" NodeJS Malware Burrows Deep Within the Host

Update 09/27/2019: Additional information regarding the malware interaction with various online advertisements has been included to highlight the click-fraud related network communications associated with Divergent. Executive summary Cisco Talos recently discovered a new malware loader being used...

Threat Roundup for March 15 to March 22

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between March 15 and March 22. 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 by highlighting key behavioral...

Virus Bulletin 2018: Exposing the Social Media Fraud Ecosystem

MONTREAL — While troll farms, influence campaigns and Twitter bots that spread disinformation have all become high-profile and negative aspects of the social-media universe, new research shows that there is actually a rich and complex supply chain behind these efforts. “Social-media fraud is...

Porn Site Becomes Hub for KovCoreG Group Malvertising Campaigns

Pornhub, a top-20 ranked U.S. website according to Alexa, was serving up large-scale malvertising attacks exposing millions of visitors to click-fraud. Behind the attacks is the KovCoreG Group, best known for distributing Kovter click-fraud malware. The campaigns, spotted by researchers at...

NemucodAES Ransomware, Kovter Click-Fraud Malware Spreading in Same Campaigns

Two malware families, NemucodAES and Kovter, are being packaged together in .zip attachments and delivered via active spam campaigns. Researcher Brad Duncan said, “together these two pieces of malware could deliver a nasty punch.” Duncan, a handler at the SANS Institute Internet Storm Center, sai...

Hacker Who Used Linux Botnet to Send Millions of Spam Emails Pleads Guilty

A Russian man accused of infecting tens of thousands of computer servers worldwide to generate millions in illicit profit has finally entered a guilty plea in the United States and is going to face sentencing in August. Maxim Senakh, 41, of Velikii Novgorod, Russia, pleaded guilty in a US federal...

Locky Ransomware, Kovter Click-Fraud Malware Spreading in Same Campaigns

Researchers at Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center have spotted malicious email campaigns using .lnk attachments to spread Locky ransomware and the Kovter click-fraud Trojan, the first time criminals have simultaneously distributed both pieces of malware. According to Microsoft, the .lnk file n...

SoakSoak Botnet Pushing Neutrino Exploit Kit and CryptXXX Ransomware

Researchers are reporting a surge in CryptXXX ransomware infections delivered via business websites compromised to redirect to the Neutrino Exploit Kit. Attackers are targeting websites running the Revslider slideshow plugin for WordPress, according to a report released Tuesday by Invincea. Behin...

1 Million Computers Hacked for making big Money from Adsense

A group of cyber criminals has infected as much as 1 Million computers around the world over the past two years with a piece of malware that hijacks search results pages using a local proxy. Security researchers from Romania-based security firm Bitdefender revealed the presence of this massive...

Angler Exploit Kit, Bedep Malware Inflating Video Views

A new sort of hacktivism emerged last week when experts from Trustwave published new research revealing that attackers are using the Angler exploit kit and the Bedep Trojan in order to drive artificial views to politically controversial videos. The motivation for the scheme, it appears, is to...

Malvertising Abuses Real-Time Bidding on Ad Networks

Dark corners of the Internet harbor trouble. They’re supposed to. But what about when Yahoo, CNN.com, TMZ and other busy destination sites heave disaster upon visitors? That’s the challenge posed by malvertising, the latest hacker Golden Goose used in cybercrime operations and even in some target...

ZeroAccess Returns, Resumes Click-Fraud Activity

Long thought dead, the peer-to-peer P2P ZeroAccess botnet has resurfaced, and as of just a few weeks ago, has returned to propagating click-fraud scams. Researchers with Dell’s SecureWorks revealed Wednesday that they witnessed the botnet restart itself from March 21 to July 2, 2014 and that...

Israeli Think-Tank Site Serves Sweet Orange Exploit

Attackers have compromised the website of a prominent Israel-based, Middle East foreign policy-focused think tank, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs JCPA. On Friday, researchers from Cyphort reported that the site was serving the Sweet Orange exploit kit via drive-by download. At the time o...

Malicious Advertisements Found on Java.com, Other High-Profile Sites

A New York-based online ad network company AppNexus, that provides a platform specializing in real-time online advertising, has again been spotted as the origin of a recent "malvertising" campaign that makes use of the Angler Exploit Kit to redirect visitors to malicious websites hosting the Aspr...

Java.com, TMZ Serving Malvertising Redirects to Angler Kit

Online ad network AppNexus has again been identified at the core of another malvertising campaign using the Angler Exploit Kit to redirect visitors to sites hosting the Asprox malware. Busy, popular websites including TMZ, Photobucket and Java.com in recent days have been serving malicious...

Click-Fraud Sefnit Variant Shuns Tor for SSH

Sefnit was the first malware family to shed light on the problem of botnets and other malicious code using the Tor anonymity network as a communication protocol. While others before and since have done the same, Sefnit made the biggest splash at the end of last summer when the botnet caused a 600...

Microsoft, Kaspersky Shed Light on Sefnit Tor Botnet

Alarm bells went off last August when spikes in Tor client downloads were traced to a large click-fraud and Bitcoin-mining botnet called Sefnit. The malware was using the popular anonymity network to communicate with hackers in order to transmit stolen data and receive additional commands. In...

Microsoft Says ZeroAccess Click-Fraud Botnet Abandoned

Microsoft is declaring the ZeroAccess botnet dead. Two weeks after obtaining a court order to disrupt the botnet’s ability to carry out click-fraud, assistant general counsel Richard Boscovich of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit said late last week that the botmasters behind ZeroAccess had abandon...