How to buy Bitcoin for ransomware payment (if you must)
Law enforcement agencies across the world advise companies that are victims of ransomware attacks not to pay the ransom. Aside from the risk of criminals taking the money and running, paying encouraging further attacks and potentially could be illegal depending on where the money is being sent. The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets…
Cryptojacking Fluctuates Along with Cryptocurrency Values
It’s hard to know who tracks the value of cryptocurrencies more closely. Is it the investors who own the virtual coins, or the criminals who hijack computing power to mine them? For their part, the criminals clearly do follow cryptocurrency values. Symantec, as detailed in its annual Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), tracked a decline…
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….
Macs Infected With New Monero-Mining Malware
Many Mac users reported in the past few weeks that a process named “mshelper” had been eating up a lot of CPU power and draining their batteries. It turns out that the process is associated with a piece of malware designed to mine for Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency. Researchers at Malwarebytes have analyzed the mshelper malware and while…
Where Rubber Meets the Road: Exposed Credentials in the Cloud Facilitate Cryptocurrency Mining
Cloud and DevOps enable powerful, transformational advances across many businesses – from finance to manufacturing. But, what happens when a cyber attacker gets a hold of the access keys to the cloud account of a leading automobile manufacturer? Well, as learned in the recently reported breach at Tesla, the attackers exploited access to mine for cryptocurrency! Reportedly,…
Cryptocurrency Fraud: In the Midst of a Gold Rush, Beware of Scammers
Bitcoin is the pioneer and obvious leader in the cryptocurrency market. But in 2017 alternative coins, or “altcoins,” began to transform the market. Nearly 1,500 cryptocurrencies are currently in circulation, and new altcoins emerge every week with Monero, Zcash and Ethereum among the top challengers to Bitcoin. But beware. Much like opportunists who devised various…
This Week in Security News: Senate Hearings and Equifax Breaches
Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, leaders of six security agencies testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Equifax hack grew in severity, and hackers used the power of Machine Learning to spread…
Predictions for 2018: Cyberthreats in the financial sector
Kaspersky Lab always keeps a very close eye on the changing cyberthreat landscape. Knowledge of past and present makes the future more predictable and allows us to make annual forecasts for various verticals. Today we want to talk about the financial sector. Businesses and individuals alike make use of financial services. And wherever there’s money,…
Steganography: A Safe Haven for Malware
Steganography, or the practice of concealing a file, message, image or video within another file, message, image or video, may be an older technique, but it continues to be an incredibly versatile and effective method for obscuring or hiding information in plain sight. In 2017, IBM X-Force has identified three different malware samples in network…
Hacker allegedly stole $7.4 million worth of Ether in 3 minutes
While there is a general consensus that the Knightscope security robot in Washington, D.C., committed suicide on Monday, the same everyone-agrees-opinion is not true for the $7.4 million heist of the cryptocurrency Ether that happened on the same day. CoinDash maintains that a hacker made off with the Ether, which comes from the app platform ethereum, during its…