Banking and Finance


  • Russian VTB bank reports major DDoS attack on bank from overseas

    December 6, 2022

    VTB’s technical infrastructure is currently under a major cyberattack from abroad. The bank’s customers may face temporary problems when using the application and the web version of VTB online due to the measures in tackling the attack that are in progress, the press service of Russia’s second-biggest lender reported on Tuesday. “VTB’s technological infrastructure is currently ...

  • UK: Cambridge Water customers’ bank details published to dark web after cyber attack

    December 3, 2022

    Bank account details of Cambridge Water customers have been published to the dark web, following a cyber attack. Customers have been left alarmed and furious after learning that names and current addresses, sort codes and account numbers are among the data stolen by cyber criminals from its parent company, South Staffordshire plc, back in August. Cambridge Water ...

  • Watch out for this triple-pronged PayPal phishing and fraud scam

    December 2, 2022

    My day started rough. It was 7 a.m., and I was just partially through my first cup of coffee, when I noticed a new message in my email inbox. It was from PayPal and the subject line said, “You’ve got a money request.” And so began my first look at this three-pronged PayPal phishing scam. Read more… Source: ZDNet  

  • Australian Cyber Task Force Looks to “Hack the Hackers” After Data Breach Crime Wave

    November 24, 2022

    A recent string of data breaches has prompted rapid changes to Australia’s cybersecurity and data protection policies, and the latest development appears to be a cyber task force set to “hack back” and actively pursue what Minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neil described as “scumbags.” Home Affairs is promising a new “tough on crime” policy toward ...

  • Cyber-enabled financial crime: USD 130 million intercepted in global INTERPOL police operation

    November 24, 2022

    LYON, France – An INTERPOL police operation to tackle online fraud has seen almost 1000 suspects arrested and the seizure of USD 129,975,440 worth of virtual assets. Fraud investigators around the world worked together over five months (28 June – 23 November) to intercept money and virtual assets linked to a wide range of cyber-enabled financial ...

  • Estonian duo accused of $575m cryptocurrency scam

    November 22, 2022

    Police in Estonia have arrested two men suspected of running a $575m (£485m) cryptocurrency scam involving hundreds of thousands of victims. Estonian police investigated the case with the FBI, and US authorities want to extradite the pair – Estonians Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turogin. The two 37-year-olds allegedly got people to invest in a cryptocurrency mining service ...

  • Gambian Central Bank says ‘don’t panic’ after data hack

    November 18, 2022

    The Gambia’s Central Bank says there’s no need to panic after a data hack. Sources allege the hackers managed to access the bank’s most sensitive files, but in a statement the Central Bank said no mission-critical systems were compromised, and that normal operations have continued unabated. It did however say one server was affected, which was promptly ...

  • DTrack activity targeting Europe and Latin America

    November 15, 2022

    DTrack is a backdoor used by the Lazarus group. Initially discovered in 2019, the backdoor remains in use three years later. It is used by the Lazarus group against a wide variety of targets. For example, Kaspersky researchers seen it being used in financial environments where ATMs were breached, in attacks on a nuclear power ...

  • Massive Phishing Campaigns Target India Banks’ Clients

    November 7, 2022

    Trend Micro researchers observed an uptick in attacks targeting bank customers in India, the common entry point being a text message with a phishing link. The SMS content urges the victims to open the embedded phishing link or malicious app download page and follow the instructions: To fill in their personally identifiable information (PII) and ...

  • DDoS attacks in Q3 2022

    November 7, 2022

    In Q3 2022, DDoS attacks were, more often than not, it seemed, politically motivated. As before, most news was focused on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but other high-profile events also affected the DDoS landscape this quarter. The pro-Russian group Killnet, active since January 2022, took the responsibility for several more cyberattacks. According to the ...

  • Robin Banks phishing service returns to steal banking accounts

    November 4, 2022

    The Robin Banks phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform is back in action with infrastructure hosted by a Russian internet company that offers protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Robin Banks faced operational disruption in July 2022, when researchers at IronNet exposed the platform as a highly threatening phishing service targeting Citibank, Bank of America, Capital One, Wells Fargo, ...

  • OPERA1ER APT in Africa

    November 3, 2022

    In 2019, Group-IB Threat Intelligence team detected a series of targeted attacks on financial organizations in Africa. Later in 2020, our professionals in collaboration with Orange, managed to piece together the seemingly disparate attacks into a single timeline and successfully attribute them to the threat actor codenamed OPERA1ER (also known as DESKTOP-GROUP, Common Raven, NXSMS). In ...

  • US Treasury thwarts DDoS attack from Russian Killnet group

    November 2, 2022

    The US Treasury Department has thwarted a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that officials attributed to Russian hacktivist group Killnet. These are the same pro-Kremlin miscreants that claimed responsibility for knocking more than a dozen US airports’ websites offline on October 10 in similar network-traffic flooding incidents. The large-scale DDoS attack didn’t disrupt air travel ...

  • Ransomware cost US banks $1.2 billion last year

    November 2, 2022

    Banks in the US paid out nearly $1.2 billion in 2021 as a result of ransomware attacks, a marked rise over the year before though it may simply be due to more financial institutions being asked to report incidents. The figures come from the most recent Financial Trend Analysis report on ransomware from the US ...

  • Banking Trojan Techniques: How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure

    October 31, 2022

    While advanced persistent threats get the most breathless coverage in the news, many threat actors have money on their mind rather than espionage. You can learn a lot about the innovations used by these financially motivated groups by watching banking Trojans. Because attackers constantly create new techniques to evade detection and perform malicious acts, studying monetarily ...

  • From RM3 to LDR4: URSNIF Leaves Banking Fraud Behind

    October 20, 2022

    A new variant of the URSNIF malware, first observed in June 2022, marks an important milestone for the tool. Unlike previous iterations of URSNIF, this new variant, dubbed LDR4, is not a banker, but a generic backdoor (similar to the short-lived SAIGON variant), which may have been purposely built to enable operations like ransomware and ...

  • Cyber attack on Bulgarian government websites traced to Russia

    October 16, 2022

    The head of Bulgaria’s National Investigation Service, Borislav Sarafov, said on October 16 that the perpetrator of a cyber attack the previous day on several Bulgarian state, government and private websites had been identified, and the attack had come from a city in Russia. Sarafov told Bulgarian media that the name and address of the perpetrator ...

  • How Wi-Fi spy drones snooped on financial firm

    October 12, 2022

    Modified off-the-shelf drones have been found carrying wireless network-intrusion kit in a very unlikely place. The idea of using consumer-oriented drones for hacking has been explored over the past decade at security conferences like Black Hat 2016, in both the US and in Europe. Naomi Wu, a DIY tech enthusiast, demonstrated a related project called Screaming ...

  • Upgraded Prilex Point-of-Sale malware bypasses credit card security

    September 29, 2022

    Security analysts have observed three new versions of Prilex PoS-targeting malware this year, indicating that its authors and operators are back in action. Prilex started as ATM-focused malware in 2014 and it pivoted to PoS (point of sale) devices in 2016. While development and distribution peaked in 2020, the malware disappeared in 2021. Kaspersky analysts now report ...

  • Prilex: the pricey prickle credit card complex

    September 28, 2022

    Prilex is a Brazilian threat actor that has evolved out of ATM-focused malware into modular point-of-sale malware. The group was behind one of the largest attacks on ATMs in the country, infecting and jackpotting more than 1,000 machines, while also cloning in excess of 28,000 credit cards that were used in these ATMs before the ...