U.S. Treasury Sanctions Russian Money Launderer in Cybercrime Crackdown

The U.S. Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions against a 37-year-old Russian woman for taking part in the laundering of virtual currency for the country's elites and cybercriminal crews, including the Ryuk ransomware group. Ekaterina Zhdanova, per the department, is said to have facilitate...

Ryuk ransomware laundering leads to guilty plea

Ryuk, a mainstay of the ransomware scene for some years until it transformed into Conti and then split off into other groups after that, is back in the news again... though not in the way you might have imagined. Its not a compromise, or a surprise comeback. What we have is a guilty plea, as a...

Russian Hacker Pleads Guilty to Money Laundering Linked to Ryuk Ransomware

A Russian national on February 7, 2023, pleaded guilty in the U.S. to money laundering charges and for attempting to conceal the source of funds obtained in connection with Ryuk ransomware attacks. Denis Mihaqlovic Dubnikov, 30, was arrested in Amsterdam in November 2021 before he was extradited...

Russian Hacker Pleads Guilty to Money Laundering Linked to Ryuk Ransomware

A Russian national on February 7, 2023, pleaded guilty in the U.S. to money laundering charges and for attempting to conceal the source of funds obtained in connection with Ryuk ransomware attacks. Denis Mihaqlovic Dubnikov, 30, was arrested in Amsterdam in November 2021 before he was extradited...

Lessons from a real-life ransomware attack

Ransomware attacks, despite dramatically increasing in frequency this summer, remain opaque for many potential victims. It isn’t anyone’s fault, necessarily, since news articles about ransomware attacks often focus on the attack, the suspected threat actors, the ransomware type, and, well, not mu...

Trickbot module descriptions

Trickbot aka TrickLoader or Trickster, is a successor of the Dyre banking Trojan that was active from 2014 to 2016 and performed man-in-the-browser attacks in order to steal banking credentials. Trickbot was first discovered in October 2016. Just like Dyre, its main functionality was initially th...

Ransomware Group FIN12 Aggressively Going After Healthcare Targets

An "aggressive" financially motivated threat actor has been identified as linked to a string of RYUK ransomware attacks since October 2018, while maintaining close partnerships with TrickBot-affiliated threat actors and using a publicly available arsenal of tools such as Cobalt Strike Beacon...

Microsoft MSHTML Flaw Exploited by Ryuk Ransomware Gang

Criminals behind the Ryuk ransomware were early exploiters of the Windows MSHTML flaw, actively leveraging the bug in campaigns ahead of a patch released by Microsoft this week. Collaborative research by Microsoft and RiskIQ revealed campaigns by Ryuk threat actors early on that exploited the fla...

Chaos Malware: Ransomware and Wiper

An under-construction malware called Chaos has been spotted, which is being advertised on an underground forum as being available for testing. While it calls itself ransomware, an analysis revealed that it’s actually more of a wiper. According to Trend Micro researcher Monte de Jesus, Chaos has...

Ryuk Ransomware Attack Sprung by Frugal Student

A European biomolecular research institute involved in COVID-19 research lost a week’s worth of research data, all thanks to a Ryuk ransomware attack traced back to a student trying to save money by buying unlicensed software. Security researchers at Sophos described the attack in a report...

Hackers Using a Windows OS Feature to Evade Firewall and Gain Persistence

A novel technique adopted by attackers finds ways to use Microsoft's Background Intelligent Transfer Service BITS so as to deploy malicious payloads on Windows machines stealthily. In 2020, hospitals, retirement communities, and medical centers bore the brunt of an ever-shifting phishing campaign...

The Malwarebytes 2021 State of Malware report: Lock and Code S02E04

This week on Lock and Code, we discuss the top security headlines generated right here on Labs. In addition, we tune in to a special presentation from Adam Kujawa about the 2021 State of Malware report, which analyzed the top cybercrime goals of 2020 amidst the global pandemic. If you just pay...

Ransomware Attack Strikes Spain’s Employment Agency

The Spanish State Employment Service SEPE in Spain has been hit by a cyberattack, suspending its communications systems across hundreds of offices and delaying thousands of appointments. SEPE is an “autonomous body” in Spain that manages and controls unemployment benefits. The cyberattack hit...

A week in security (March 1 – 7)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, our podcast featured Eva Galperin who talked to us about defending online anonymity and speech. We wrote about how Ryuk ransomware has developed a worm-like capability, how Exchange servers are attacked by Hafnium zero-days, 21 million free VPN users’ data was...

Ryuk ransomware develops worm-like capability

The French governments computer emergency readiness team, thats part of the National Cybersecurity Agency of France, or ANSSI, has discovered a Ryuk variant that has worm-like capabilities during an incident response. For those unacquainted with Ryuk, it is a type of ransomware that is used in...

Ryuk Ransomware: Now with Worming Self-Propagation

A new version of the Ryuk ransomware is capable of worm-like self-propagation within a local network, researchers have found. The variant first emerged in Windows-focused campaigns earlier in 2021, according to the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems ANSSI. The agency...

The story of ZeroLogon

This is the story of a vulnerability that was brought about by the incorrect use of an encryption technique. After it was discovered by researchers, the vulnerability was patched and that should have been the end of the story. Unfortunately the patch caused problems of its own, which made it very...

Ryuk Rakes in $150M in Ransom Payments

The Ryuk ransomware has earned its operators an estimated $150 million, according to an examination of the malware’s money-laundering operations. Joint research released this week from Brian Carter, principal researcher at HYAS, and Vitali Kremez, CEO at Advanced Intelligence, took a the look und...

A week in security (December 7 – December 13)

Last week on Malwarebytes podcast we talked to Doug Levin, founder of the K12 cybersecurity resource center and advisor to the K12 Security Information Exchange, about how schools can plan for a cybersecure 2021. We also released a Malwarebytes Labs report revealing that 50 percent of schools did...

VideoBytes: Ryuk Ransomware Targeting US Hospitals

Hello Folks! In this Videobyte, we’re talking about why hospitals are being targeted by the Ryuk ransomware, what tricks they are using to pull this off and what their motivations might be. Ryuk ransomware is being spread to hospitals using targeted phishing emails that infect systems with the...