Know your enemy: Defining the new taxonomy of malicious emails

Just as it is the default tool for most businesses, email’s capacity for rapid, mass communication has made it a favourite instrument of criminals. As a result, malicious emails have become a common occurrence in most consumer and business inboxes. Although chances are that most people will correctly identify the most common malicious emails as…

Phishing attacks responsible for three-quarters of all malware

With phishing now widely used as a mechanism for distributing ransomware, a new NTT Security reveals that 77% of all detected ransomware globally was in four main sectors – business & professional services (28%), government (19%), health care (15%) and retail (15%). While technical attacks on the newest vulnerabilities tend to dominate the media, many…

The Necurs Botnet: A Pandora’s Box of Malicious Spam

This is the tale of a cybercrime botnet operation that, within about five years of its existence, has been named one of the largest botnets in the world. It’s called the Necurs botnet. It militarizes up to 6 million zombie endpoints, delivers some of the worst banking Trojans and ransomware threats in batches of millions…

38% of consumers affected by ransomware pay up

Consumers are increasingly being targeted with ransomware, and many of them are paying up, according to Trustlook. Since the beginning of 2016, ransomware has gone from a relatively exclusive category of malware utility to a mainstream destructive tool used in wave after wave of phishing attacks against individuals and companies alike. Ransomware is now so…

Report: Cybercrime climate shifts dramatically in first quarter

The first quarter of 2017 brought with it some significant changes to the threat landscape and we aren’t talking about heavy ransomware distribution either. Threats which were previously believed to be serious contenders this year have nearly vanished entirely, while new threats and infection techniques have forced the security community to reconsider collection and analysis…

The top 5 dumbest cyber threats that work anyway

The common conception of cyber attacks is kind of like bad weather: ranging from irritating to catastrophic, but always unpredictable. Hackers are simply too sophisticated to draw any reliable judgments on and we shouldn’t try. As it turns out, some hackers are fairly predictable in their successful use of really dumb attacks. Here’s a few.

Tax season security tips: Protect yourself from cybercrime

Between December 2016 and February 2017, IBM X-Force researchers saw a 6,000 percent increase in tax-related spam emails. The researchers see this increase and other factors as evidence that cybercriminals are not slowing down their attacks in the days leading up to Tax Day 2017. IBM’s analysis found that historically 54 million of Americans who…