- Multistage Attack Delivers BillGates/Setag Backdoor, Can Turn Elasticsearch Databases into DDoS Botnet ‘Zombies’
July 23, 2019
Elasticsearch is no stranger to cybercriminal abuse given its popularity and use to organizations. In fact, this year’s first quarter saw a surge of attacks — whether by exploiting vulnerabilities or taking advantage of security gaps — leveled against Elasticsearch servers. These attacks mostly deliveredcryptocurrency-mining malware, as in the case of one attack we saw last year. The latest attack we spotted deviates from the ...
- Cybercrime gang adds new tactics to credit card data-stealing campaign
July 23, 2019
A hacking operation has deployed new malware in the latest evolution of its campaign to make money by stealing credit card data. The FIN8 cybercrime group was first identified in January 2016, and typically targets point-of-sale (POS) systems with malware attacks designed to steal credit card information, which is then sold on for profit on dark ...
- 5th Annual Global Cyber Security Forum – Lebanon
July 23, 2019
Press Release Taking in cognisance the evolving cyber threats across the globe, several nations have formed committee’s & taskforces to implement the best strategies to fight cybercrimes. These task forces are destined to ensure the nation’s assets are protected against any threats by implementing best policies & state-of-the-art solutions, whilst creating a robust ecosystem for ease ...
- Lancaster University students’ data stolen by cyber-thieves
July 23, 2019
Students’ personal data has been stolen in a “sophisticated and malicious” phishing attack at Lancaster University. Officials said the information had been used to send bogus invoices to applicants. “A very small number” of student records, phone numbers and ID documents were also accessed, it said. The breach has been reported to police and the Information Commissioner’s Office. In ...
- Massive 7.5TB breach reveals secret Russian IT projects
July 22, 2019
Hackers breached the server of a major contractor working on behalf of the Russian intelligence service before stealing 7.5TB of sensitive data and sharing this freely with other hackers and journalists. Attackers infiltrated the company network of SyTech on 13 July, according to BBC Russia, and began a process of copying data while deleting masses of it. ...
- Old Tools for New Money: URL Spreading Shellbot and XMRig Using 17-year old XHide
July 19, 2019
One of our honeypots detected a threat that propagates by scanning for open ports and brute forcing weak credentials, installing a Monero cryptocurrency miner and a Perl-based IRC backdoor as the final payload. The miner process is hidden using XHide Process Faker, a 17-year old open source tool used to fake the name of a ...
- Spam Campaign Targets Colombian Entities with Custom-made ‘Proyecto RAT,’ Uses Email Service YOPmail for C&C
July 18, 2019
We observed a recent campaign that primarily targets financial institutions and governmental organizations in the South American region, particularly in Colombia. This blog post covers the activities we observed, the remote access tools (RATs) used, the campaign’s techniques and procedures, and its indicators of compromise (IoCs). Our findings indicate that the campaign appears to be ...
- Bulgaria’s hacked database is now available on hacking forums
July 18, 2019
The database of Bulgaria’s National Revenue Agency (NRA), which was hacked over the weekend and sent to local reporters, is now being shared on hacking forums, ZDNet has learned from sources in the threat intelligence community. Download links to the hacked database have been shared by a hacked data trader known as Instakilla, believed to be operating out of ...
- Mirai Botnet Sees Big 2019 Growth, Shifts Focus to Enterprises
July 18, 2019
The infamous Mirai internet of things botnet is spiking in growth while changing up its tactics, techniques and procedures so far in 2019, to target more and more enterprise-level hardware, It’s a state of affairs that presents a greater concern than ever before given the ongong migration to the cloud era, researchers said. According to researchers ...
- Why Cities Are a Low-Hanging Fruit For Ransomware
July 15, 2019
Ransomware attacks against local governments and cities are repeatedly making headlines, with crippling results on city operations and budgets. Last month, the Florida city of Riviera Beach paid hackers $600,000 after being hit by a ransomware attack that downed its computer systems for three weeks. In 2018, several Atlanta city systems were crippled after a ransomware attack extorted ...

