Banking and Finance


  • Making Intelligence Actionable: Cybersecurity Preparedness in the Credit Union Industry

    July 3, 2019

    As the threat landscape continues to evolve, organizations need to be increasingly proactive in their approach to cybersecurity. One industry that’s taken proactive measures toward cybersecurity preparedness is the credit union industry. Over the last couple of years, the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) developed a tool called the Automated Cybersecurity Examination Tool (ACET) to help credit unions ...

  • Phishing, ransomware are top cyberattacks on financial services firms

    July 1, 2019

    Phishing and ransomware attacks are the most reported types of cyberattacks on financial services firms, but in most cases the causes of outages were far more mundane. Financial services firms reported 819 cyber incidents to their watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), last year, a huge rise on the 69 incidents reported the year before. Retail banks were responsible ...

  • New Dridex Variant Slips By Anti-Virus Detection

    June 28, 2019

    A never-before-seen Dridex variant has been spotted in phishing emails using anti-virus detection evasion tactics. Researchers have spotted a variant of the Dridex banking trojan with new obfuscation capabilities that help it skirt anti-virus detection. While Dridex has been around since 2011, researchers told Threatpost Friday that they recently spotted phishing emails distributing a never-before-seen variant of the ...

  • Riltok mobile Trojan: A banker with global reach

    June 25, 2019

    Riltok is one of numerous families of mobile banking Trojans with standard (for such malware) functions and distribution methods. Originally intended to target the Russian audience, the banker was later adapted, with minimal modifications, for the European “market.” The bulk of its victims (more than 90%) reside in Russia, with France in second place (4%). ...

  • Houdini malware targets victims with keylogger, online bank account theft tools

    June 17, 2019

    A new variant of the Houdini malware has been detected in campaigns against financial institutions and their customers. Last week, cybersecurity researchers from Cofense said in a blog post that the new strain of Houdini — also known as HWorm — was released by its author on June 2, 2019. Dubbed WSH Remote Access Tool (RAT), it took the ...

  • Goznym Malware: Cybercriminal Network Dismantled In International Operation

    May 16, 2019

    An unprecedented, international law enforcement operation has dismantled a complex, globally operating and organised cybercrime network. The criminal network used GozNym malware in an attempt to steal an estimated $100 million from more than 41 000 victims, primarily businesses and their financial institutions. A criminal Indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh, USA charges ...

  • Source code of Carbanak trojan found on VirusTotal

    April 23, 2019

    The source code of one of the world’s most dangerous malware strains has been uploaded and left available on VirusTotal for two years, and almost nobody has noticed. It was discovered by security researchers from US cyber-security firm FireEye, analyzed for the past two years, and made public today, so other members of the cyber-security community ...

  • Data-Wiping Cyberattacks Plague Financial Firms

    March 6, 2019

    Over a quarter of surveyed financial institutions reported that they were targeted by destructive cyberattacks over the past year, bent on completely destroying data. That’s according to a new Carbon Black report unveiled at RSA this year. The report, “Modern Bank Heists: The Bank Robbery Shifts to Cyberspace,” outlines the top attacks that financial firms are facing ...

  • Fileless Banking Trojan Targeting Brazilian Banks Downloads Possible Botnet Capability, Info Stealers

    March 4, 2019

    Trend Micro analyzed a fileless malware with multiple .BAT attachments and a batch file from IoCs reported by researchers online that was capable of opening an IP address, downloading a PowerShell with a banking trojan payload, and installing a hack tool and an information stealer. Looking further, we observed it stealing machine information and user ...

  • Russian national, author of NeverQuest banking trojan, pleads guilty

    February 23, 2019

    A Russian national pleaded guilty today in a New York court of creating, running, and infecting users with the NeverQuest banking trojan –also known as Snifula and Vawtrack. The man’s name is Stanislav Vitaliyevich Lisov, a Russian national who went online under the names of “Black” and “Blackf,” and who, according to a Department of Justice press ...

  • Malspam campaign fakes Google reCAPTCHA images to fool victims

    February 22, 2019

    A recently discovered malspam campaign targeting customers of a Polish bank was found using forgeries of Google reCAPTCHA images to fake legitimacy. The banking malware was delivered via phishing emails that purported to seekin confirmation of a recent banking transaction that in reality never occurred, according to Feb. 21 blog post published week by Sucuri. Recipients who panicked at the ...

  • Hackers Use Compromised Banks as Starting Points for Phishing Attacks

    February 19, 2019

    Cybercriminals attacking banks and financial organizations use their foothold in a compromised infrastructure to gain access to similar targets in other regions or countries. In a report released today and shared with BleepingComputer, international security company Group-IB specialized in preventing cyber attacks describes a so called cross-border domino-effect that can lead to spreading an infection beyond the initial ...

  • Banks Under Attack: Tactics and Techniques Used to Target Financial Organizations

    February 8, 2019

    US$100 – 300 billion: That’s the estimated losses that financial institutions can potentially incur annually from cyberattacks. Despite the staggering amount, it’s unsurprising — over the past three years, several banks suffered $87 million in combined losses from attacks that compromised their SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication)infrastructures. That’s just the tip of the iceberg: A ...

  • Metro Bank targeted with 2FA-bypassing SS7 attacks

    February 1, 2019

    Metro Bank has reportedly fallen victim to a sophisticated two-factor authentication (2FA) bypass attack after hackers infiltrated a telecoms firm’s text messaging protocol. The Signalling Systems No. 7 (SS7) protocol is used by telecom firms to coordinate how texts and calls are routed around the world. But according to Motherboard, hackers are more actively exploiting SS7, and ...

  • New Android Malware Apps Use Motion Sensor to Evade Detection

    January 18, 2019

    Even after so many efforts by Google for preventing its Play Store from malware, shady apps somehow managed to fool its anti-malware protections and get into its service to infect Android users with malware. Two such Android apps have recently been spotted on the Google Play Store by security researchers with the Trend Micro malware research ...

  • TA505 Crime Gang Debuts Brand-New ServHelper Backdoor

    January 11, 2019

    The latest malware from TA505 has been seen targeting banks, retailers and restaurants with two different versions. A new backdoor named ServHelper has been spotted in the wild, acting as both a remote desktop agent as well as a downloader for a RAT called FlawedGrace. According to Proofpoint, the prolific cybercriminal gang known as TA505 developed ServHelper, which has ...

  • Phishing template uses fake fonts to decode content and evade detection

    January 3, 2019

    Proofpoint researchers recently observed a phishing kit with peculiar encoding utilized in a credential harvesting scheme impersonating a major retail bank. While encoded source code and various obfuscation mechanisms have been well documented in phishing kits, this technique appears to be unique for the time being in its use of web fonts to implement the encoding. When the ...

  • Operation Sharpshooter Uses Fileless Malware to Attack Global Infrastructure

    December 12, 2018

    The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team detected a malware campaign dubbed Operation Sharpshooter which attacked nuclear, defense, energy, and financial targets from all over the world. As detailed by McAfee’s research team, the campaign dubbed “Operation Sharpshooter” makes use of an in-memory essential to download and execute a second stage payload named Rising Sun. Moreover, the Rising Sun implant ...

  • Financial Conduct Authority warns asset management industry facing cyber risks

    December 10, 2018

    The asset management industry suffers from a lack of expertise and preparedness with regard to cyber security, and is risking “serious harm to its clients” and the wider market, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has warned. In a multi-firm review of the asset management and wholesale banking sectors published today (10 December), the FCA also found an overreliance ...

  • DarkVishnya: Banks attacked through direct connection to local network

    December 6, 2018

    While novice attackers, imitating the protagonists of the U.S. drama Mr. Robot, leave USB flash drives lying around parking lots in the hope that an employee from the target company picks one up and plugs it in at the workplace, more experienced cybercriminals prefer not to rely on chance. In 2017-2018, Kaspersky Lab specialists were invited to research ...