Fake Adobe Flash Updates Hide Malicious Crypto Miners

While fake Flash updates that push malware have traditionally been easy to spot and avoid, a new campaign has employed new tricks that stealthily download cryptocurrency miners on Windows systems. To the average user, the newly discovered samples, which have been active as early as August, seem...

Roaming Mantis, part III

In Q2 2018, Kaspersky Lab published two blogposts about Roaming Mantis sharing details of this new cybercriminal campaign. In the beginning, the criminals used DNS hijacking in vulnerable routers to spread malicious Android applications of Roaming Mantis aka MoqHao and XLoader, spoofing legitimat...

USB threats from malware to miners

Introduction In 2016, researchers from the University of Illinois left 297 unlabelled USB flash drives around the university campus to see what would happen. 98% of the dropped drives were picked up by staff and students, and at least half were plugged into a computer in order to view the content...

Threat Roundup for September 14 to September 21

Today, as we do every week, Talos is giving you a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed this week — covering the dates between Sept. 14 and 21. As with previous roundups, this post isn’t meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, we will summarize the threats we’ve observed by...

New Malware Combines Ransomware, Coin Mining and Botnet Features in One

Windows and Linux users need to beware, as an all-in-one, destructive malware strain has been discovered in the wild that features multiple malware capabilities including ransomware, cryptocurrency miner, botnet, and self-propagating worm targeting Linux and Windows systems. Dubbed XBash, the new...

New Malware Combines Ransomware, Coin Mining and Botnet Features in One

Windows and Linux users need to beware, as an all-in-one, destructive malware strain has been discovered in the wild that features multiple malware capabilities including ransomware, cryptocurrency miner, botnet, and self-propagating worm targeting Linux and Windows systems. Dubbed XBash, the new...

XBash Malware Packs Double Punch: Destroys Data and Mines for Crypto Coins

Researchers have discovered a new sophisticated malware family in the wild, which wrecks havoc on Windows and Linux systems with a combination of data destructive ransomware and malicious cryptomining. The malware, dubbed by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 researchers who discovered it as Xbash, has...

bitcoin -- Denial of Service and Possible Mining Inflation

Bitcoin Core reports: CVE-2018-17144, a fix for which was released on September 18th in Bitcoin Core versions 0.16.3 and 0.17.0rc4, includes both a Denial of Service component and a critical inflation vulnerability. It was originally reported to several developers working on Bitcoin Core, as well...

Thousands of MikroTik Routers Hacked to Eavesdrop On Network Traffic

Last month we reported about a widespread crypto-mining malware campaign that hijacked over 200,000 MikroTik routers using a previously disclosed vulnerability revealed in the CIA Vault 7 leaks. Now Chinese security researchers at Qihoo 360 Netlab have discovered that out of 370,000 potentially...

How's that Security Back Door Doing? (Part 2)

In the first part of this blog post I wrote about how recursive DNS rDNS is an attack surface that many enterprises don't currently protect. Bad actors are exploiting that fact and developing advanced targeted threats that use DNS to bypass conventional security tools such as firewalls, secure we...

Podcast: Bad Packets Report Founder on Rising Cryptojacking Attacks

Security researcher Troy Mursch of the Bad Packets Report joins the Threatpost Podcast to discuss recent cryptojacking campaigns, and why these types of malicious cryptomining attacks are on the rise. Criminals have been harnessing devices – from mobile devices to servers – to mine cryptocurrenci...

Defending Elections from Foreign Adversaries: Election Buster

Election Buster is an open source tool created in 2014 to identify malicious domains masquerading as candidate webpages and voter registration systems. During 2016, fake domains were used to compromise credentials of a Democratic National Committee DNC IT services company, and foreign adversaries...

GitMiner v2.0 - Tool For Advanced Mining For Content On Github

Advanced search tool and automation in Github. This tool aims to facilitate research by code or code snippets on github through the site's search page. MOTIVATION Demonstrates the fragility of trust in public repositories to store codes with sensitive information. REQUIREMENTS lxml requests...

CoinHive intelligent web mining two or three thing-vulnerability warning-the black bar safety net

Mining has now become black hat profit, the main means of recently Internet by chance found part of the website is hung it to exist after the web mining behavior, different from the conventional virusoperating systemin the mining acts, pages mainly on the site hanging on the malicious JS scripts,...

A Bug in Chrome Gives Bad Actors License to Play ‘20 Questions’ with Your Private Data

In a 2013 interview with The Telegraph, Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google was quoted as saying: “You have to fight for your privacy or lose it.” Five years later, with the ‘Cambridge Analytica’ data breach scandal fresh in our memory, Eric Schmidt’s statement rings as a self-evident truth. Similar...

This Week in Security News: Hijacks and Healthcare

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. This week, Singapore looks into the effectiveness of virtual browsers in an attempt to reduce cyberattacks on healthcare systems. Also, cybercriminals...

Qualys BrowserCheck CoinBlocker Protects Users From Active Cryptojacking Campaigns

Qualys Malware Research Labs recently released the Qualys BrowserCheck CoinBlocker Chrome Extension. We have seen enthusiastic adoption from users across the globe in the first week since its release, which has given us enough telemetry data to indicate success in protecting users from popular...

Hackers Infect Over 200,000 MikroTik Routers With Crypto Mining Malware

Security researchers have discovered at least three massive malware campaigns exploiting hundreds of thousands of unpatched MikroTik routers to secretly install cryptocurrency miners on computers connected to them. In all, the malware campaigns have compromised more than 210,000 routers from...

The Pirate Bay alternatives (2018) in wake of Cryptomining scandal

By Waqas The process of cryptocurrency mining slows down your computer and increases the energy bill - That is why it is time to find The Pirate Bay alternatives. The Pirate Bay is undoubtedly one of the most visited torrenting and file sharing websites. But did you know ThePirateBay.org is using...

Google Bans Cryptocurrency Mining Android Apps From the Play Store

Following Apple's lead in banning cryptocurrency mining apps, Google has also updated its Play Store policy this week to ban apps that mine cryptocurrencies on users' devices in the background. However, there are countless cryptocurrency mining apps, including MinerGate, AA Miner, NeoNeonMiner, a...