Banking and Finance


  • New Zealand stock exchange halted trading after DDoS attacks

    August 26, 2020

    New Zealand’s stock exchange (NZX) has been impacted by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks during the last two days, forcing it to shut down trading until the connectivity issues were resolved. NZX operates New Zealand’s capital, risk, and commodity markets, and it supplies market information including real-time stock quotes, market data and news. The stock market announced around ...

  • New FritzFrog P2P botnet has breached at least 500 enterprise, government servers

    August 19, 2020

    A P2P botnet newly-discovered by researchers has struck at least 500 government and enterprise SSH servers over 2020. On Wednesday, cybersecurity firm Guardicore Labs published research into FritzFrog, a peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet that has been detected by the company’s sensors since January this year. According to researcher Ophir Harpaz, FritzFrog has attempted to brute-force SSH servers belonging ...

  • CactusPete APT group’s updated Bisonal backdoor

    August 13, 2020

    CactusPete (also known as Karma Panda or Tonto Team) is an APT group that has been publicly known since at least 2013. Some of the group’s activities have been previously described in public by multiple sources. We have been investigating and privately reporting on this group’s activity for years as well. Historically, their activity has ...

  • Cerberus Android malware source code offered for sale for $100,000

    July 27, 2020

    The maintainer of Cerberus banking trojan for Android is auctioning the entire project for a price starting at $50,000 or close the deal for double the money. The price includes everything from source code to customer list along with installation guide and the scripts to make components work together. For at least one year, the group behind ...

  • Diebold Nixdorf warns of a new class of ATM ‘black box’ attacks across Europe

    July 16, 2020

    ATM maker Diebold Nixdorf is warning banks of a new type of ATM “black box” attack that was recently spotted used across Europe. ATM “black box” attacks are a type of jackpotting attack — when cybercriminals make an ATM spit out cash. A jackpotting attack can be executed with malware installed on an ATM, or by ...

  • The Tetrade: Brazilian banking malware goes global

    July 14, 2020

    Brazil is a well-known country with plenty of banking trojans developed by local crooks. The Brazilian criminal underground is home to some of the world’s busiest and most creative perpetrators of cybercrime. Like their counterparts’ in China and Russia, their cyberattacks have a strong local flavor, and for a long time, they limited their attacks ...

  • Evilnum hackers use the same malware supplier as FIN6, Cobalt

    July 9, 2020

    Hackers in the Evilnum group have developed a toolset that combines custom malware, legitimate utilities, and tools bought from a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) provider that caters to big fintech threat actors. The group has been active since at least 2018 and focuses on companies from the financial technology sector that offer trading and investment platforms. Its targets are ...

  • ‘Keeper’ hacking group behind hacks at 570 online stores

    July 7, 2020

    A hacking group known as “Keeper” is responsible for security breaches at more than 570 online e-commerce portals over the last three years. The Keeper gang broke into online store backends, altered their source code, and inserted malicious scripts that logged payment card details entered by shoppers in checkout forms. These types of attacks are what the ...

  • New WastedLocker ransomware demands payments of millions of USD

    June 23, 2020

    Evil Corp, one of the biggest malware operations on the internet, has slowly returned to life after several of its members were charged by the US Department of Justice in December 2019. In a report shared with ZDNet today, Fox-IT, a division within the NCC Group, has detailed the group’s latest activities following the DOJ charges. The Evil Corp group, also known ...

  • Sodinokibi Ransomware Now Scans Networks For PoS Systems

    June 23, 2020

    Cybercriminals behind recent Sodinokibi ransomware attacks are now upping their ante and scanning their victims’ networks for credit card or point of sale (PoS) software. Researchers believe this is a new tactic designed to allow attackers to get the biggest bang for their buck – ransom payments and credit card data. The compromise of PoS software ...

  • IcedID Banker is Back, Adding Steganography, COVID-19 Theme

    June 18, 2020

    A new version of the IcedID banking trojan has debuted that notably embraces steganography – the practice of hiding code within images – in order to stealthily infect victims. It has also changed up its process for eavesdropping on victims’ web activity. Researchers at Juniper Threat Labs have uncovered an email spam campaign circulating in the ...

  • US bank customers targeted in ongoing Qbot campaign

    June 15, 2020

    Security researchers at F5 Labs have spotted ongoing attacks using Qbot malware payloads to steal credentials from customers of dozens of US financial institutions. Qbot (also known as Qakbot, Pinkslipbot, and Quakbot) is a banking trojan with worm features  used to steal banking credentials and financial data, as well as to log user keystrokes, deploy backdoors, and drop additional ...

  • FBI warns of increased hacking risk if using mobile banking apps

    June 10, 2020

    The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today warned mobile banking app users that they will be increasingly targeted by hackers trying to steal their credentials and take over their banking accounts. The alert, published on the agency’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), says that the increased usage of such apps during the pandemic could lead to ...

  • Silent Night Banking Trojan Charges Top Dollar on the Underground

    May 21, 2020

    A descendant of the infamous Zeus banking trojan, dubbed Silent Night by the malware’s author, has emerged on the scene, with a host of functionalities available in a spendy malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model. Custom builds can run as much as $4,000 per month to use, which researchers say is now placing the code out of the range ...

  • Zeus Sphinx revamped as coronavirus relief payment attack wave continues

    May 11, 2020

    The Zeus Sphinx banking Trojan is now receiving frequent updates and upgrades to its malicious arsenal while being deployed in active coronavirus scams. On Monday, IBM Security researcher Nir Shwarts said the company has been tracking the evolution of the malware which is based on the leaked codebase of the well-known Zeus v.2 Trojan. Zeus Sphinx — also referred ...

  • Spear-phishing campaign compromises executives at 150+ companies

    April 30, 2020

    A cybercrime group operating since mid-2019 has breached the email accounts of high-ranking executives at more than 150 companies, cyber-security firm Group-IB reported today. The group, codenamed PerSwaysion, appears to have targeted the financial sector primarily, which accounted for more than half of its victims; although, victims have been recorded at companies active across other verticals ...

  • A look at the ATM/PoS malware landscape from 2017-2019

    April 23, 2020

    From remote administration and jackpotting, to malware sold on the Darknet, attacks against ATMs have a long and storied history.  And, much like other areas of cybercrime, attackers only refine and grow their skillset for infecting ATM systems from year-to-year. So what does the ATM landscape look like as of 2020? Let’s take a look. ATM attacks aren’t ...

  • Financial Cyberthreats in 2019

    April 16, 2020

    Financial cyberthreats are malicious programs that target users of services such as online banking, e-money, and cryptocurrency, or that attempt to gain access to financial organizations and their infrastructure. These threats are usually accompanied by spam and phishing activities, with malicious users creating fake financial-themed pages and emails to steal victims’ credentials. In order to study ...

  • Threat Spotlight: Gootkit Banking Trojan

    April 14, 2020

    Gootkit is a sophisticated banking Trojan which can perform various malicious activities such as: web injection, taking screenshots, video recording, email parsing, and so on. Gootkit emerged during the summer of 2014 but is still active, making it a viable threat to financial institutions to this day. BlackBerry most recently observed a Gootkit campaign via AZORult infostealer ...

  • Overlay Malware Leverages Chrome Browser, Targets Banks and Heads to Spain

    April 14, 2020

    Researchers are warning of a remote overlay malware attack that leverages a fake Chrome browser plugin to target the accounts of banking customers in Spain. Grandoreiro is a type of remote overlay banking trojan, designed to help attackers overtake devices and display a full-screen overlay image when victim accesses their online banking account. In the background, meanwhile, the ...