Paying Ransom Won’t Help as VECT 2.0 Ransomware Destroys Data Irreversibly

VECT 2.0 ransomware contains fatal flaws that permanently destroy files, making recovery impossible and rendering ransom payments useless for victims worldwide...

Feds Tie ‘Scattered Spider’ Duo to $115M in Ransoms

U.S. prosecutors last week levied criminal hacking charges against 19-year-old U.K. national Thalha Jubair for allegedly being a core member of Scattered Spider , a prolific cybercrime group blamed for extorting at least $115 million in ransom payments from victims. The charges came as Jubair and...

Iranian Hacker Pleads Guilty in $19 Million Robbinhood Ransomware Attack on Baltimore

An Iranian national has pleaded guilty in the U.S. over his involvement in an international ransomware and extortion scheme involving the Robbinhood ransomware. Sina Gholinejad aka Sina Ghaaf, 37, and his co-conspirators are said to have breached the computer networks of various organizations in...

The 2024 Ransomware Landscape: Looking back on another painful year

The ransomware landscape in 2024 continued to evolve at a rapid pace, outgrowing many of the trends we saw in 2023. Threat actors remained relentless and innovative, targeting organizations of all sizes and sectors. In this post, we’ll examine the latest data points, discuss notable groups, and...

U.S. DoJ Indicts North Korean Hacker for Ransomware Attacks on Hospitals

The U.S. Department of Justice DoJ on Thursday unsealed an indictment against a North Korean military intelligence operative for allegedly carrying out ransomware attacks against healthcare facilities in the country and funneling the payments to orchestrate additional intrusions into defense,...

New York Increases Cybersecurity Rules for Financial Companies

Another example of a large and influential state doing things the federal government wont: Boards of directors, or other senior committees, are charged with overseeing cybersecurity risk management, and must retain an appropriate level of expertise to understand cyber issues, the rules say...

A week in security (October 16 – October 22)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Ragnar Locker ransomware group taken down IT administrators passwords are awful too The hot topics from Europes largest trade fair for IT security Clever malvertising attack uses Punycode to look like KeePasss official website 3 crucial security steps people should...

Why Attackers Target the Healthcare Industry

Key Takeaways: Personal health information PHI is an incredibly valuable category of personal data. When compromised and sold on the dark web, this data can be sold for thousands of dollars. Healthcare is a valuable target to attackers, including the group Killnet, which targeted healthcare sites...

TrickBot gang members sanctioned after pandemic ransomware attacks

In a collaborative partnership, officials in the United States and the United Kingdom unmasked and imposed financial sanctions against seven members of the notorious Russian gang TrickBot alias "TrickLoader", a mainstream banking Trojan turned malware-as-a-service MaaS platform for other criminal...

Massive HTTP DDoS Attack Hits Record High of 71 Million Requests/Second

Web infrastructure company Cloudflare on Monday disclosed that it thwarted a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service DDoS attack that peaked at over 71 million requests per second RPS. "The majority of attacks peaked in the ballpark of 50-70 million requests per second RPS with the largest...

CISA issues alert with South Korean government about DPRK's ransomware antics

CISA and other federal agencies were joined by the National Intelligence Service NIS and the Defense Security Agency of the Republic of Korea ROK in releasing the latest cybersecurity advisory in the US government's ongoing StopRansomware effort. This alert highlights continuous state-sponsored...

Cuba Ransomware Extorted Over $60 Million in Ransom Fees from More than 100 Entities

The threat actors behind Cuba aka COLDDRAW ransomware have received more than $60 million in ransom payments and compromised over 100 entities across the world as of August 2022. In a new advisory shared by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA and the Federal Bureau of...

Paying Ransomware Paints Bigger Bullseye on Target’s Back

Paying ransomware attackers doesn’t pay off and often paints a bigger target on a victim’s back. Eighty percent of ransomware victims that paid their attackers were hit a second time by the malware scourge. New ransomware numbers come from a Cybereason’s April ransomware survey of 1,456...

Cyber Risk Retainers: Not Another Insurance Policy

The one-two punch of a cyberattack can be devastating. There is the breach and then the related mitigation costs. Implementing a comprehensive Incident Response IR gameplan into a worst-case-scenario should not be a post-breach scramble. And when that IR strategy includes insurance, it also must...

Ransomware in the CIS

Introduction These days, when speaking of cyberthreats, most people have in mind ransomware, specifically cryptomalware. In 2020–2021, with the outbreak of the pandemic and the emergence of several major cybercriminal groups Maze, REvil, Conti, DarkSide, Avaddon, an entire criminal ecosystem took...

REvil Affiliates Confirm Getting Screwed Out of Payments

A day after news broke about REvil having screwed their own affiliates out of ransomware payments – by using double chats and a backdoor that let REvil operators hijack ransom payments – those affiliates took to the top Russian-language hacking forum to renew their demands for REvil to fork over...

How REvil May Have Ripped Off Its Own Affiliates

There’s no honor amongst thieves, but this is beyond rude: Malware specialists have found evidence of how REvil’s leadership may have screwed their own affiliates out of their cut of ransomware payouts. Malware specialists researching newly available samples from REvil – aka Sodinokibi, a...

Are Tax Breaks Encouraging Ransom Payments?

Why tax deductions for ransom payments send the wrong signals to threat actors and their victims...

Cyber-Insurance Fuels Ransomware Payment Surge

Ransomware victims are increasingly falling back on their cyber-insurance providers to pay the ransom when they’re hit with an extortion cyberattack. But security researchers warn that this approach can quickly become problematic. In the first half of 2020, ransomware attacks accounted for 41...

Ransomware’s New Swindle: Triple Extortion

Ransomware attacks are exploding at a staggering rate, and so are the ransoms being demanded. Now experts are warning against a new threat — triple extortion — which means that attackers are expanding out to demand payments from customers, partners and other third parties related to the initial...