Malware

November 14, 2017

You should be extra careful when opening files in MS Office. When the world is still dealing with the threat of ‘unpatched’ Microsoft Office’s built-in DDE feature, researchers have uncovered a serious issue with another Office component that could allow attackers to remotely install malware on targeted computers. The vulnerability is a memory-corruption issue that resides in all ...

November 13, 2017

Researchers are warning users about a wave of recent attacks targeting U.S. financial institutions that leverage a new banking Trojan dubbed IcedID. The IcedID Trojan was spotted in September by researchers at IBM’s X-Force Research team. They said the Trojan has several standout techniques and procedures, such as the ability to spread over a network and ...

November 8, 2017

Cybercriminals, including state-sponsored hackers, have started actively exploiting a newly discovered Microsoft Office vulnerability that Microsoft does not consider as a security issue and has already denied to patch it. Last month, we reported how hackers could leverage a built-in feature of Microsoft Office feature, called Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), to perform code execution on the targeted device ...

November 8, 2017

The “remorseless” growth of cyber crime is leading to 4,000 ransom attacks a day and gangs’ technological capability now threatens critical parts of the financial sector, the head of Europol said on Wednesday. Online criminals have become so sophisticated that gangs have created “conglomerations” with company structures that specialize in different criminal activities to carry out ...

November 8, 2017

Nothing is free in this world. If you are searching for free hacking tools on the Internet, then beware—most freely available tools, claiming to be the swiss army knife for hackers, are nothing but a scam. For example, Cobian RAT and a Facebook hacking tool that we previously reported on The Hacker News actually could hack, but of the one who ...

November 3, 2017

One of the breakthroughs of the Stuxnet worm that targeted Iran’s nuclear program was its use of legitimate digital certificates, which cryptographically vouched for the trustworthiness of the software’s publisher. Following its discovery in 2010, researchers went on to find the technique was used in a handful of other malware samples both with ties to ...

October 31, 2017

2017 has been the year of ransomware. While the file-encrypting malware has existed in one form or another for almost three decades, over the last few months it’s developed from a cybersecurity concern to a public menace. The term even made it into the dictionary in September. In particular, 2017 had its own summer of ransomware: while incidents ...

October 27, 2017

The Ramnit worm (W32.Ramnit) was an aggressively propagated Windows-based worm that first appeared around 2010. Its creator used an extensive range of propagation techniques to ensure that it spread quickly and widely. Once it infects a computer, it copies itself to all attached and removable drives. Crucially, it also searches for and infects .exe, .dll, ...

October 27, 2017

England’s National Health Service (NHS) could have avoided the ransomware hack that crippled its systems in May, according to a government report. “Basic IT security” was all that was required to prevent the “unsophisticated” WannaCry attack, which affected more than a third of NHS organizations, said the National Audit Office (NAO). The full scale of the incident saw over 19,000 ...

October 26, 2017

Despite early reports that there was no use of National Security Agency-developed exploits in this week’s crypto-ransomware outbreak, research released by Cisco Talos suggests that the ransomware worm known as “Bad Rabbit” did in fact use a stolen Equation Group exploit  revealed by Shadowbrokers to spread across victims’ networks. The attackers used EternalRomance, an exploit that bypasses security over ...