Former Microsoft Engineer Gets Prison for Role in Reveton Ransomware

A former Microsoft network engineer who was charged in April this year has now been sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to money laundering in connection with the Reveton ransomware. Reveton malware is old ransomware, also known as scareware or police ransomware that instead of...

Former Microsoft Engineer Gets Prison for Role in Reveton Ransomware

A former Microsoft network engineer who was charged in April this year has now been sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to money laundering in connection with the Reveton ransomware. Reveton malware is old ransomware, also known as scareware or police ransomware that instead of...

New Decryptor Unlocks CryptXXX Ransomware

When exploits kits, in particular Angler, spread ransomware infections, people get nervous. The latest strain to appear in the virulent Angler kit is CryptXXX, which researchers at Proofpoint and Fox IT tied to the same group dropping old-school Reveton ransomware and Bedep click-fraud malware...

FBI Suggests Ransomware Victims — 'Just Pay the Ransom Money'

Your Headache is not my Problem. If your computer gets hacked and infected with malware that holds your data for ransom, just pay off the criminals to see your valuable data again and do not expect the FBI to save them – it's what the FBI is advising concerning ransomware. Ransomware is a...

Third Adobe Flash 0Day Under Attack in HanJuan Exploit Kit

The little-known HanJuan exploit kit is delivering attacks targeting the most recent Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability. Adobe has yet to produce a patch for the flaw, which researchers at Trustwave said is a use-after-free vulnerability. The flaw is the third to hit Flash in the last two...

Android Ransomware First to Encrypt Data on Mobile Devices

A strain of ransomware that encrypts data on Android mobile devices, the first of its kind, has spread to 13 countries since it was first spotted less than a month ago. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab today disclosed details on Pletor, an expensive Trojan that popped up on an underground forum selli...

Device-Locking Ransomware Moves to Android

UPDATE–Ransomware has been wreaking havoc on desktops for many years now, with attackers demanding that victims pay a fee to unlock the infected system. This kind of malware hasn’t been a huge issue yet on mobile devices, but that’s beginning to change, albeit slowly. A new piece of mobile malwar...

Blackhole and Cool Exploit Kits Nearly Extinct

When authorities in Russia arrested Paunch, the alleged creator of the Blackhole exploit kit, last month, security researchers and watchers of the malware underground predicted that taking him off the board would put a dent in the use of Blackhole and force its customers onto other platforms. Six...

Exploit Kit Adds Vector for Silverlight Vulnerability

Developers behind the Angler Exploit Kit have apparently added a new exploit over the last week that leverages a known vulnerability in Microsoft’s Silverlight browser framework. Silverlight, similar to Adobe Flash, is Microsoft’s plug-in for streaming media on browsers and is perhaps most known...

Fake FBI Ransomware Targeting OS X Users

The Federal Bureau of Investigation issued an alert yesterday warning users about a strain of ransomware purporting to come from the FBI that is targeting Mac OS X machines. This time, the ransomware isn’t malware at all, but a website that uses JavaScript to load numerous iframes. The webpage...

New Reveton Ransomware Variant Steals Passwords

The developers of Reveton have expanded that ransomware’s repertoire with a password stealing functionality, according to new research. Ransomware, sometimes called scareware, is a type of malware that locks down infected machines, offering to unlock them only after a fee has been paid. Oftentime...

Group behind largest Ransomware campaign arrested by Spanish police

Police in Spain have arrested a gang of 11 cyber criminals who used ransomware to demand money from thousands of victims in 30 countries using malware known as Reveton. Police arrested six Russians, two Ukrainians and two Georgians in the Costa del Sol. The gang leader, a 27-year-old Russian, was...

Group behind largest Ransomware campaign arrested by Spanish police

Police in Spain have arrested a gang of 11 cyber criminals who used ransomware to demand money from thousands of victims in 30 countries using malware known as Reveton. Police arrested six Russians, two Ukrainians and two Georgians in the Costa del Sol. The gang leader, a 27-year-old Russian, was...

FBI Warns of New Twist to Reveton, Citadel Malware Scams

The cybercrime group behind the Citadel malware and Reveton ransomware has upped the stakes with a new extortion technique, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center said today. Reveton scams have now co-opted the Internet Crime Complaint Center with a new fake warning to users whose computers ha...

Go Daddy Attributes DNS Hack to Phishing

A spokesman at Go Daddy, the popular domain registrar and Web host company, believes that some of its users may have been phished – and that’s to blame for the barrage of ransomware some customers have been seeing in past week or so. Last week it was reported that attackers had placed malicious D...

New Java Attack Introduced into Cool Exploit Kit

A new exploit has been found in the Cool Exploit Kit for a vulnerability in Java 7 Update 7 as well as older versions, a flaw that’s been patched by Oracle in Java 7 Update 9. Cool Exploit Kit was discovered last month and is largely responsible for dropping the Reveton ransomware. A new Metasplo...

Ransomware Scams Netting Criminals Up To $33,000 a Day

Ransomware pays. A lot. These extortion scams, in which infected computers are essentially locked down by malware and electronic payment is demanded for a supposed cure, can net the criminal behind the scam as much as $33,000 per day. Symantec studied 16 variants of independently developed...

Citadel Malware Used to Infiltrate Airport VPN

The Citadel Trojan is really starting to become kind of a pain in the neck. Not content to sit by and watch while its more well-known rivals Zeus and SpyEye get all the attention, the Citadel malware has begun showing up in some interesting places, with the latest example being the discovery of t...

Reveton Ransomware uses Fake FBI Message to Extort Money

The FBI today warned of Internet-borne malware masquerading as a message from the law enforcement agency that locks computers until the user pays a fine for allegedly downloading and/or distributing illegal content. “We’re getting inundated with complaints,” Donna Gregory of the Internet Crime...

Citadel Malware Crew May Be Taking Its Wares Off the Market

It turns out that malware authors–at least some of them–may have an interest in economics. Perhaps worried about market saturation or commoditization, the distributors of the Citadel malware, which has been used to deliver ransomware in the past, are apparently about to take their creation off th...