Ransomware Attack Hits Health Firm LabCorp
LabCorp, a company that provides “diagnostic, drug development and technology-enabled solutions for more than 115 million patient encounters per year,” serves hundreds of thousands of customers nationwide and processes tests on more than 2.5 million patient specimens per week. With revenues that topped $10 billion last year, the health company operates a network of more…
Move Over, Ransomware: Why Cybercriminals Are Shifting Their Focus to Cryptojacking
According to the 2018 IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, the frequency and sophistication of malicious cryptocurrency mining, also called “cryptojacking,” has increased drastically in the past year. This mining is changing malicious actors’ priorities: While they had previously targeted companies’ data and financial assets, they are now seeking to extract value from organizations’ computing resources….
Cybercrime tactics & techniques Q2 2018
A generally slow quarter reflects an overall lull in cybercrime, picking up where Q1 left off with cryptominers continuing to dominate, ransomware continuing to evolve through experimentation, and exploits making a small but significant comeback. In nearly every malware category for both business and consumer detections, we saw a decrease in volume, corroborating our general…
PowerShell Threats Grow Further and Operate in Plain Sight
The preinstalled and versatile Windows PowerShell has become one of the most popular choices in cyber criminals’ arsenals. We have observed an increase of 661 percent in computers where malicious PowerShell activity was blocked from the second half of 2017 to the first half of 2018—a clear indication that attackers are still growing the use…
Timehop Releases New Details About July 4 Breach
Additional information includes PII affected and the authentication issue that led to the breach. Timehop, the company that specializes in “digital nostalgia,” is releasing more information on the July 4 breach that compromised millions of users’ personally identifiable information (PII). New details include the timeline of the attack, the information affected, and the steps the…
Ransomware back in big way, 181.5 million attacks since January
SonicWall announces record numbers for malware volume, ransomware attacks, encrypted threats and chip-based attacks in the mid-year update of the 2018 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report. “Real-time cyber threat intelligence is more critical than ever as cybercriminals continue to find new attack vectors — like encrypted and chip-based attacks,” said Chad Sweet, CEO at The Chertoff…
10 ways to prevent, detect and recover from ransomware and zeroday threats
Ransomware is a kind of malware that typically encrypts data, blocking access to it until a fee is paid to the attacker. While the hype used to outweigh the actual risk, ransomware has evolved, spread and grown rapidly more sophisticated in response to our efforts to defend against it. There have been some high-profile ransomware…
New insider attack steals passwords by reading thermal energy from keyboards
After entering a password, your regular computer keyboard might appear to look the same as always, but a new approach harvesting thermal energy can illuminate the recently pressed keys, revealing that keyboard-based password entry is even less secure than previously thought. Computer Science Ph.D. students Tyler Kaczmarek and Ercan Ozturk from UC Irvine’s Donald Bren…
New Malware Variant Hits With Ransomware or Cryptomining
A long-known ransom Trojan has added new tactics and a new talent, according to research released by Kaspersky Labs. The Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Rakhni family has been around since 2013, but a new variant does a search of files on the victim’s system and decides whether to launch ransomware — or simply use the computer to mine cryptocurrency….
Cybercriminals will gravitate to criminal activity that maximizes their profit
McAfee released its McAfee Labs Threats Report: June 2018, examining the growth and trends of new malware, ransomware, and other threats in Q1 2018. McAfee Labs saw on average five new threat samples every second, including growth in cryptojacking and other cryptocurrency mining malware, and notable campaigns demonstrating a deliberate drive to technically improve upon…