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Pay Up, Or We’ll Make Google Ban Your Ads
A new email-based extortion scheme apparently is making the rounds, targeting Web site owners serving banner ads through Google's AdSense program. In this scam, the fraudsters demand bitcoin in exchange for a promise not to flood the publisher's ads with so much bot and junk traffic that Google's...
FBI Releases IC3 2019 Internet Crime Report
The Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center IC3 has released the 2019 Internet Crime Report, which includes statistics based on data reported by the public through the IC3 website. The top three crimes types reported by victims in 2019 were...
Happy New Fear! Gift-wrapped spam and phishing
Pre-holiday spam Easy money In the run-up to Christmas and New Year, scam е-mails mentioning easy pickings, lottery winnings, and other cash surprises are especially popular. All the more so given how simple it is to adapt existing schemes simply by mentioning the holiday in the subject line. For...
Quarterly Report: Incident Response trends in fall 2019
By David Liebenberg and Kendall McKay. While many Cisco Talos Incident Response CTIR engagements have shown similar patterns over the past two quarters, we’re seeing a dangerous trend emerge this winter. Threat actors are increasingly combining the exfiltration of sensitive data along with data...
Ashley Madison Breach Extortion Scam Targets Hundreds
Nearly five years after the high-profile Ashley Madison data breach, hundreds of impacted website users are being targeted by a new extortion attack this past week. The 2015 data breach of the adultery website led to 32 million accounts being publicly dumped online, including victims’ names,...
The Hidden Cost of Ransomware: Wholesale Password Theft
Organizations in the throes of cleaning up after a ransomware outbreak typically will change passwords for all user accounts that have access to any email systems, servers and desktop workstations within their network. But all too often, ransomware victims fail to grasp that the crooks behind the...
The Story of Tiversa
The New Yorker has published the long and interesting story of the cybersecurity firm Tiversa. Watching "60 Minutes," Boback saw a remarkable new business angle. Here was a multibillion-dollar industry with a near-existential problem and no clear solution. He did not know it then, but, as he turn...
Caller Poses as CISA Rep in Extortion Scam
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA is aware of a phone scam where a caller pretends to be a CISA representative. The scammer claims to have knowledge of the potential victim’s questionable behavior and attempts to extort money. If you receive a threatening call from someone...
Ransomware: 30 Years and Still Going Strong
In the tech world, systems – and methods to break said systems – seem to evolve by the minute. Technological advancement grows exponentially each year, and the realm of cybersecurity is no exception. However, some entities have survived and even thrived over the decades, rather than falling...
Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2019. Advanced threat predictions for 2020
Nothing is more difficult than making predictions. Rather than trying to gaze into a crystal ball, we will be making educated guesses based on what has happened during the last 12 months, to see where we can see trends that might be exploited in the near future. This is what we think might happen...
Fake Cozy Bear Group Making DDoS Extortion Demands
A group calling themselves "Cozy Bear" has been emailing various companies with an extortion letter, demanding payment and threatening targeted DDoS attacks if their demands are not met...
Understanding the Ripple Effect: Large Enterprise Data Breaches Threaten Everyone
Big businesses are constantly under attack, and that affects everyone from customers and business partners to parties with national security interests. When successful, the initial compromise is only a means to an end — the real goal is to mount follow-on attacks like spearphishing, extortion...
Two Hackers Who Extorted Money From Uber and LinkedIn Plead Guilty
Two grey hat hackers have pleaded guilty to blackmailing Uber, LinkedIn, and other U.S. corporations for money in exchange for promises to delete data of millions of customers they had stolen in late 2016. In a San Jose courthouse in California on Wednesday, Brandon Charles Glover 26 of Florida a...
Two Hackers Who Extorted Money From Uber and LinkedIn Plead Guilty
Two grey hat hackers have pleaded guilty to blackmailing Uber, LinkedIn, and other U.S. corporations for money in exchange for promises to delete data of millions of customers they had stolen in late 2016. In a San Jose courthouse in California on Wednesday, Brandon Charles Glover 26 of Florida a...
Phorpiex Botnet Sending Out Millions of Sextortion Emails Using Hacked Computers
A decade-old botnet malware that currently controls over 450,000 computers worldwide has recently shifted its operations from infecting machines with ransomware or crypto miners to abusing them for sending out sextortion emails to millions of innocent people. Extortion by email is growing...
Europol: Ransomware remains top threat in IOCTA report
The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, or Europol, just released its annual Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment IOCTA report for the year. And we weren’t surprised to find that ransomware, despite its palpable decline in volume these past few months—a trend we’ve also...
Ransomware continues assault against cities and businesses
Ransomware continues to make waves in the US, forcing multiple cities and organizations into tough choices. Pressed for cash and time, local government organizations are left with few options: Either pay the ransom as soon as possible and encourage criminals to continue bringing essential service...
Who’s Behind the GandCrab Ransomware?
The crooks behind an affiliate program that paid cybercriminals to install the destructive and wildly successful GandCrab ransomware strain announced on May 31, 2019 they were terminating the program after allegedly having earned more than $2 billion in extortion payouts from victims. What follow...
A week in security (June 17 – 23)
Last week on the Malwarebytes Labs blog, we took a look at the growing pains of smart cities, took a deep dive into AI, jammed along to Radiohead, and looked at the lessons learned from Chernobyl in relation to critical infrastructure. We also explored a new Steam phish attack, and pulled apart a...
Radiohead’s ransom response shows novel approach for ransomware victims
Last week, British rock band Radiohead thwarted an attempted digital ransom, in which unnamed hackers stole roughly 18 hours of unreleased music dating back to the band’s recording of its studio album OK, Computer, revealing some less-than-ok computer security sorry. Instead of paying a ransom to...