Bending the Curve: Operational Cyber Epidemiology for Ransomware

Ransomware is often treated as a detection problem, but the most disruptive incidents behave more like outbreaks. A single foothold can spread through identities, administrative tools, and shared services while responders make time-critical decisions with incomplete visibility. This paper present...

How CB LiveOps Helps with Vulnerability Assessment

Security and IT Operations teams often have no reliable way to assess the current state of endpoints across their enterprise, leading to increased risk of breach, inability to make informed remediation decisions, and unnecessary spending on infrastructure maintenance. A real-time endpoint query a...

How threat actors are using SMB vulnerabilities

Some of the most devastating ransomware and Trojan malware variants depend on vulnerabilities in the Windows Server Message Block SMB to propagate through an organization’s network. Windows SMB is a protocol used by PCs for file and printer sharing, as well as for access to remote services. A pat...

CoinVault Ransomware Authors Sentenced to 240 Hours of Community Service

Almost three years after the arrest of two young Dutch brothers, who pleaded guilty to their involvement in creating and distributing CoinVault ransomware malware, a district court in Rotterdam today sentenced them to 240 hours of community service. In 2015, the two suspects — Melvin 25-year-old...

The state of malicious cryptomining

While cryptocurrencies have been around for a long time and used for legitimate purposes, online criminals have certainly tarnished their reputation. Unfortunately, the same benefits offered by these decentralized and somewhat anonymous digital currencies were quickly abused to extort money, as w...

Now you see me: Exposing fileless malware

Attackers are determined to circumvent security defenses using increasingly sophisticated techniques. Fileless malware boosts the stealth and effectiveness of an attack, and two of last years major ransomware outbreaks Petya and WannaCry used fileless techniques as part of their kill chains. The...

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...

Know your threats: the nine scariest malware monsters

It's been a particularly ghoulish year in cybersecurity, from Russian hacks to ransomware outbreaks. The bad boogey man in the black hoodie has been pulling one over the collective public. It's dark and creepy, but users refuse to stop peeking behind the door. It's enough to make even the most...

Report: Second quarter dominated by ransomware outbreaks

The second quarter of 2017 brought ransomware to unprecedented levels with worldwide outbreaks that went almost out of control. In scenarios reminiscent of yesteryears worms, WannaCry created global panic as it used a critical vulnerability in the SMBv1 protocol to propagate like wildfire. Within...