Fake Cyberpunk Ape Executives target artists with malware-laden job offer
The wacky world of ape jpegs are at the heart of yet another increasingly bizarre internet scam, which contains malware, stolen accounts, a faint possibility of phishing, and zips full of ape pictures. The Ape Executives have a job offer you can, and must, refuse Lots of people with art profiles on social media in…
Hackers fool major tech companies into handing over data of women and minors to abuse
Some major tech companies have unwittingly opened harassment and exploitation opportunities to the women and children who they have pledged to protect. This happened because they provided information in response to emergency data requests from legitimate law enforcement accounts that hackers had compromised. This finding came from four federal law enforcement agencies and a couple…
Hive ransomware impacts California non-profit health organisation
Ransomware authors are once again targeting health services, holding important files to ransom and impacting potentially vital services. On this occasion, the victims are a non-profit organisation assisting people with their healthcare needs in California. When Hive ransomware strikes The victim, Partnership HealthPlan of California, has apparently been struggling since at least March 24 with…
The Conti ransomware leaks
On February 27, an individual with insights into the Conti ransomware group started leaking a treasure trove of data beginning with internal chat messages. Conti is responsible for a number of high profile attacks, including one against the Irish Healthcare system which has cost more than $48 million and more importantly has had an unprecedented…
“We absolutely do not care about you”: Sugar ransomware targets individuals
Ransomware tends to target organizations. Corporations not only house a trove of valuable data they can’t function without, but they are also expected to cough up a considerable amount of ransom money in exchange for their encrypted files. And while corporations struggle to keep up with attacks, ransomware groups have left the average consumer relatively…
Ransomware cyberattack forces New Mexico jail to lock down
Five days after the new year, the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Bernalillo County, New Mexico suddenly went on lockdown. The reason? A ransomware cyberattack has knocked the jail’s internet connection offline, rendering most of their data systems, security cameras, and automatic doors unusable. Prisoners were confined in their cells while MDC technicians struggled to…
Patchwork APT caught in its own web
Patchwork is an Indian threat actor that has been active since December 2015 and usually targets Pakistan via spear phishing attacks. In its most recent campaign from late November to early December 2021, Patchwork has used malicious RTF files to drop a variant of the BADNEWS (Ragnatela) Remote Administration Trojan (RAT). What is interesting among…
SideCopy APT: Connecting lures to victims, payloads to infrastructure
Last week, Facebook announced that back in August it had taken action against a Pakistani APT group known as SideCopy. Facebook describes how the threat actors used romantic lures to compromise targets in Afghanistan. In this blog post we are providing additional details about SideCopy that have not been published before. We were able to…
BlackMatter ransomware group announces shutdown. But for how long?
The BlackMatter ransomware gang has announced they are going to shut down their operation, citing pressure from local authorities. And pressure there is. Only two weeks ago, we wrote about a warning that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the National Security Agency (NSA) had issued over…
Freedom Hosting operator gets 27 years for hosting Dark Web child abuse sites
The wheels of justice have turned, if perhaps a bit slower than you may have expected. A Dublin resident, Eric Eoin Marques, has been sentenced to 27 years in federal prison. The reason is the frankly terrifying tally of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) he helped to distribute. Eoin helped to make no fewer than…
