- Rethinking Responsibilities and Remedies in Social-Engineering Attacks
September 18, 2019
In the pantheon of catchy cybersecurity slogans that should never have caught on, two about social engineering spring to mind almost immediately: “End users are the weakest link” and “attackers only have to be lucky once; defenders have to be lucky all the time.” Both of those statements have been repeated by practitioners for time ...
- Smominru Botnet Indiscriminately Hacked Over 90,000 Computers Just Last Month
September 18, 2019
Insecure Internet-connected devices have aided different types of cybercrime for years, most common being DDoS and spam campaigns. But cybercriminals have now shifted toward a profitable scheme where botnets do not just launch DDoS or spam—they mine cryptocurrencies as well. Smominru, an infamous cryptocurrency-mining and credential-stealing botnet, has become one of the rapidly spreading computer viruses ...
- Assessing the impact of protection from web miners
September 17, 2019
Kaspersky Lab present the results of evaluating the positive economic and environmental impact of blocking web miners with Kaspersky products. The total power saving can be calculated with known accuracy using the formula <w>·N, where <w> is the average value of the increase in power consumption of the user device during web mining, and N is ...
- Astaroth Spy Trojan Uses Facebook, YouTube Profiles to Cover Tracks
September 13, 2019
Facebook and YouTube profiles are at the heart of an ongoing phishing campaign spreading the Astaroth trojan, bent on the eventual exfiltration of sensitive information. The attack is sophisticated in that it uses normally trusted sources as cover for malicious activities – thus evading usually effective email and network security layers. The attack starts with an ...
- Simjacker attack exploited in the wild to track users for at least two years
September 12, 2019
Security researchers have disclosed today an SMS-based attack method being abused in the real world by a surveillance vendor to track and monitor individuals. “We are quite confident that this exploit has been developed by a specific private company that works with governments to monitor individuals,” security researchers from AdaptiveMobile Security said in a report released today. “We ...
- Feds Indict 281 People for Involvement in Massive Email Fraud Scheme
September 11, 2019
Federal authorities have arrested 281 people and seized nearly $3.7 million in a coordinated effort between multiple agencies to disrupt a massive email-fraud scheme. Perpetrators of a global business email compromise (BEC) scheme were the target of a four-month investigation that began in May called Operation reWired, a coordinated effort by the U.S. Departments of Justice (DoJ), ...
- Uncovering IoT Threats in the Cybercrime Underground
September 10, 2019
Amid the growth of the internet of things (IoT), manufacturers and integrators are testing the limits of how the technology can be applied, as seen in how new forms of connected devices are hitting the market. Some applications play critical roles in industries while others provide more convenience for consumers. The wide spectrum of IoT ...
- Thousands of servers infected with new Lilocked (Lilu) ransomware
September 6, 2019
Thousands of web servers have been infected and had their files encrypted by a new strain of ransomware named Lilocked (or Lilu). Infections have been happening since mid-July, and have intensified in the past two weeks, ZDNet has learned. Based on current evidence, the Lilocked ransomware appears to target Linux-based systems only. First reports date to mid-July, after ...
- Malware Classification with ‘Graph Hash,’ Applied to the Orca Cyberespionage Campaign
September 6, 2019
In malware research, threat hunting and sharing of threat intelligence, such as exchanging indicators of compromise (IoCs) in the form of hashes (e.g., MD5s, SHA256s), are common industry practices and helpful for information security professionals. Researchers, for instance, would typically search for malware samples on VirusTotal using hashes. However, hashes have some characteristics that could ...
- New Bedford Hit With $5.3m Ransomware Demand
September 5, 2019
A Massachusetts city has revealed that cyber-criminals tried to hold its data ransom to the tune of more than $5m over the summer, in a sign of the growing risk to organizations from online extortionists. The city of New Bedford was hit with the popular Ryuk strain of ransomware in early July, encrypting data on over 150 ...