The sale and purchase of unauthorized access to compromised enterprise networks has become a linchpin for cybercriminal operations, particularly in facilitating ransomware attacks.
Underground forums are sharing guidelines on breaching networks and selling the access they obtain, leaving the exploitation to other malicious actors. On underground criminal forums, these transactions allow actors with complementary skills to collaborate, amplifying the impact and reach of cyberattacks. The market for such access has grown notably, especially as ransomware operators increasingly employ double-extortion tactics.
Read more…
Source: Rapid7
Related:
- Hackers are scanning computers worldwide for open Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets…
November 27, 2017
Security researcher Didier Stevens setup a trap, or in digital security terms – a “honeypot”. Think of it as digital sting operation, where someone puts a server online open to attack – but nothing of value is really there, it’s only there to record the attacks as they happen. The logs of these honeypots revealed hackers ...
- Physical Theft Meets Cybercrime: The Illicit Business of Selling Stolen Apple Devices
November 15, 2017
Online scams and physical crimes are known to intersect. In an incident last May, we uncovered a modus operandi and the tools they can use to break open iCloud accounts to unlock stolen iPhones. Further research into their crossover revealed how deep it runs. There’s actually a sizeable global market for stolen mobile phones—and by extension, ...
- New IcedID Trojan Targets US Banks
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 ...
- Russian ‘Fancy Bear’ Hackers Using (Unpatched) Microsoft Office DDE Exploit
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 ...
- Fast-growing cyber crime threatens financial sector: Europol
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 ...
- Hacker Distributes Backdoored IoT Vulnerability Scanning Script to Hack Script Kiddies
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 ...