Healthcare

September 15, 2020

When we published our 2020 Predictions report in December, we didn’t realize there was a global pandemic brewing that would give cybercriminals an almost daily news cycle to take advantage of in their attacks against people and organizations around the world. Malicious actors have always taken advantage of big news to use as lures for ...

September 4, 2020

This past spring, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, online learning became the new norm as universities and classrooms around the world were forced to close their doors. By April 29, 2020, more than 1.2 billion children across 186 countries were impacted by school closures. Shortly after schools began to transition to emergency remote learning, it ...

August 21, 2020

A new ransomware operation named DarkSide began attacking organizations earlier this month with customized attacks that have already earned them million-dollar payouts. Starting around August 10th, 2020, the new ransomware operation began performing targeted attacks against numerous companies. In a “press release” issued by the threat actors, they claim to be former affiliates who had made millions ...

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 ...

August 12, 2020

NHS staff were hit with a wave of malicious email attacks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with doctors, nurses and other key workers reporting over 40,000 spam and phishing attacks between March and the first half of July. Data from NHS Digital obtained through a Freedom of Information request sent by UK think tank, ...

August 6, 2020

Robots used in hospitals and care homes to assist patients and the vulnerable can be fully hijacked by cyberattackers. On Thursday at Black Hat USA, McAfee’s Advanced Threat Research (ATR) team disclosed new research into the robots, in which remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities were uncovered, potentially leading to mobile, audio, and video tampering on the hospital floor. The robot ...

August 4, 2020

An INTERPOL assessment of the impact of COVID-19 on cybercrime has shown a significant target shift from individuals and small businesses to major corporations, governments and critical infrastructure. With organizations and businesses rapidly deploying remote systems and networks to support staff working from home, criminals are also taking advantage of increased security vulnerabilities to steal data, ...

July 29, 2020

The FBI has issued a security alert about Netwalker ransomware operators targeting U.S. and foreign government organizations, advising their victims not to pay the ransom and reporting incidents to their local FBI field offices. FBI’s flash alert also provides indicators of compromise associated with the Netwalker ransomware (also known as Mailto) and includes a list of ...

July 16, 2020

The UK Government has released a joint statement with the US and Canada claiming Moscow has sought to infiltrate research from pharmaceutical companies and universities. It is believed Cozy Bear, a group linked to the Russian government, have sought to steal the information to help the country’s own efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic. The sophisticated ...

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 ...

June 17, 2020

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, the role of the Internet in our lives has undergone changes, including irreversible ones. Some of these changes are definitely for the better, some are not very good, but almost all of them in some way affect digital security issues. We decided to take a closer look at the changes around ...

June 16, 2020

Cyber-security experts have revealed today 19 vulnerabilities in a small library designed in the 90s that has been widely used and integrated into countless of enterprise and consumer-grade products over the last 20+ years. The number if impacted products is estimated at “hundreds of millions” and includes products such as smart home devices, power grid equipment, ...

June 8, 2020

German authorities arrested a 21-year-old man and launched a terrorism investigation after he threatened to carry out an attack targeting Muslims, prosecutors said on Monday. The 21-year-old man from the northern city of Hildesheim made the threat in an anonymous online chat forum on May 29, announcing his intention to carry out an attack “with multiple ...

May 27, 2020

A fresh ransomware strain known as “Unicorn” has emerged, first seen this week targeting users by pretending to be an official government COVID-19 contact tracing app. According to an advisory from the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) from the Agency for Digital Italy (AgID), the malware family is taking advantage of the rollout of “Immuni” – ...

May 14, 2020

We recently noticed a Twitter post by MalwareHunterTeam that showed a Java downloader with a low detection rate. Its name, “Company PLP_Tax relief due to Covid-19 outbreak CI+PL.jar”, suggests it may have been used in a Covid-19-themed phishing campaign. Running this file led to the download of a new, undetected malware sample written in Node.js; this trojan ...

May 14, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has been connected to a 238% surge in cyberattacks against banks, new research claims. On Thursday, VMware Carbon Black released the third edition of the Modern Bank Heists report, which says that financial organizations experienced a massive uptick in cyberattack attempts between February and April this year — the same months in which COVID-19 began to spread ...

May 12, 2020

Tropic Trooper, a threat actor group that targets government, military, healthcare, transportation, and high-tech industries in Taiwan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, has been active since 2011. The group was reportedly using spear-phishing emails with weaponized attachments to exploit known vulnerabilities. Primarily motivated by information theft and espionage, the group has also been seen adopting different strategies such ...

May 11, 2020

Unit 42 researchers found that public cloud infrastructure has communicated with domains known to distribute COVID-19 themed malware. On March 24, 2020, Unit 42 published a blog discussing attack patterns used by malicious actors in relation to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). Taking these findings a step further, researchers attempted to uncover if there are malicious COVID-19 related ...

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 ...

May 7, 2020

Focusing on one of the most active subsets of the global threat landscape, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 tracks Nigerian cyber criminals involved in Business Email Compromise (BEC) activities under the name SilverTerrier. Over the past 90 days (Jan. 30 – Apr. 30), we have observed three SilverTerrier actors/groups launch a series of 10 COVID-19 themed ...