The WannaCry Security Legacy and What’s to Come

May 12 will mark the second anniversary of the WannaCry ransomware cryptoworm attack. It was a troubling time: During the four-day long ordeal, the cryptoworm infected more than 300,000 endpoints among 200,000 separate victims throughout 150 countries. It propagated rapidly through the EternalBlu...

A mining multitool

Recently, an interesting miner implementation appeared on Kaspersky Lab's radar. The malware, which we dubbed PowerGhost, is capable of stealthily establishing itself in a system and spreading across large corporate networks infecting both workstations and servers. This type of hidden consolidati...

Recline on the Qualys Couch: Examining Patching Behavior

In a perfect world, organizations would patch vulnerabilities immediately after they’re disclosed, preemptively blocking exploits and dodging most cyber attacks. Of course, reality is far from that hypothetically ideal state. Organizations often leave critical vulnerabilities unpatched for months...

Securing IT Assets By Prioritizing Protection And Remediation

As hackers get faster at weaponizing exploits for disclosed bugs, InfoSec teams need — more than ever — automated, continuous and precise IT asset inventorying, vulnerability management, threat prioritization and patch deployment. Critical vulnerabilities that linger unpatched for weeks or months...

Microsoft Windows - 'EternalRomance'/'EternalSynergy'/'EternalChampion' SMB Remote Code Execution (Metasploit) (MS17-010)

This module requires Metasploit: https://metasploit.com/download Current source: https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework Windows XP systems that are not part of a domain default to treating all network logons as if they were Guest. This prevents SMB relay attacks from gaining administrativ...

Massive Smominru Cryptocurrency Botnet Rakes In Millions

Criminals behind the cryptocurrency miner Smominru have raked in between $2.8 to $3.6 million since May. The payday is impressive, say researchers at Proofpoint, who report that operators have amassed a formidable botnet of infected servers pumping out 24 Monero daily, or the equivalent of $8,500...

A worthy upgrade: Next-gen security on Windows 10 proves resilient against ransomware outbreaks in 2017

Adopting reliable attack methods and techniques borrowed from more evolved threat types, ransomware attained new levels of reach and damage in 2017. The following trends characterize the ransomware narrative in the past year: Three global outbreaks showed the force of ransomware in making...

A worthy upgrade: Next-gen security on Windows 10 proves resilient against ransomware outbreaks in 2017

Adopting reliable attack methods and techniques borrowed from more evolved threat types, ransomware attained new levels of reach and damage in 2017. The following trends characterize the ransomware narrative in the past year: Three global outbreaks showed the force of ransomware in making...

U.S. Government Blames North Korea for WannaCry

The United States government is officially blaming North Korea for the WannaCry ransomware outbreak in May that infected nearly a quarter-million computers in 150 countries. Calling it a “careless and reckless” attack, White House Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert said Tuesday at a White Hous...

Devilish ONI Attacks in Japan Use Wiper to Cover Tracks

NotPetya has shown the way for attackers who want use ransomware as a cover for a deeper incursion. The latest example is a wave of wiper attacks hitting organizations in Japan for possibly as long as the last nine months. Researchers at Cybereason this week said they had detected targeted attack...

EternalBlue Exploit Used in Retefe Banking Trojan Campaign

Criminals behind the Retefe banking Trojan have added a new component to their malware that uses the NSA exploit EternalBlue. The update makes Retefe the latest malware family to adopt the SMBv1 attack against a patched Windows vulnerability, and could signal an emerging trend, said researchers a...

Original Author of Petya Ransomware is Back & He Wants to Help NotPetya Victims

The author of original Petya ransomware is back. After 6 months of silence, the author of the now infamous Petya ransomware appeared today on Twitter to help victims unlock their files encrypted by a new version of Petya, also known as NotPetya. "We're back having a look in NotPetya," tweeted...

Petya Ransomware: What You Need to Know

On Tuesday, a variant of the ransomware "Petya" began propagating in several countries across Europe. This new variant leverages the EternalBlue exploit used in WannaCry, and also takes advantage of misconfigured permissions to spread throughout the network. EternalBlue is a leaked exploit...

Dealing with Petya

Akamai is aware of and is tracking the malware threat known as "Petya". Petya is ransomware spread using several methods, including PSexec, Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line WMIC, and the EternalBlue exploit used by the WannaCry family of ransomware. The malware spreads via port 139...

Second Global Ransomware Outbreak Under Way

Join Kaspersky Lab and Comae Technologies Thursday June 29, 2017 at 10 a.m. Eastern time for a webinar “The Inside Story of the Petya/ExPetr Ransomware.” Click here to attend. A global WannaCry-like ransomware outbreak–which began in Russia and Ukraine and spread across Europe–is being reported...

Risk of 'Destructive Cyber Attacks' Prompts Microsoft to Update XP Again

Fearing destructive attacks precipitated by the availability of the nation-state exploits in the wild that spawned the WannaCry outbreak, Microsoft today announced that its Patch Tuesday updates would include fixes for older versions of Windows, including XP. The move is unusual and mimics a...

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...

Windows 10 Mitigations Make Future EternalBlue Attacks Difficult

The emergence of a port of the EternalBlue exploit to Windows 10 signals that white-hat researchers have likely done what the NSA has already long ago accomplished. The leaked version of the powerful Windows SMB attack shared by the ShadowBrokers in April was built only to attack Windows XP and...

Threat actors leverage EternalBlue exploit to deliver non-WannaCry payloads

The “EternalBlue” exploit MS017-010 was initially used by WannaCry ransomware and Adylkuzz cryptocurrency miner. Now more threat actors are leveraging the vulnerability in Microsoft Server Message Block SMB protocol – this time to distribute Backdoor.Nitol and Trojan Gh0st RAT. FireEye Dynamic...

WannaCry Development Errors Enable File Recovery

WannaCry may have caused worldwide havoc on May 12 when it rode the coattails of the NSA’s weaponized EternalBlue exploit to infect computers in 150 countries, but that doesn’t mean it was a quality piece of ransomware. A number of programming errors in the code are floating to the surface and...