Everyone Is $$$ To Cybercriminals Using Ransomware

More than 50 percent of those polled have been victims of ransomware in some way, shape, or form recently. Nineteen percent are being attack more than 50 times per month and a disturbing 42 percent don’t know how often they’re being attacked with ransomware. These stats should be major warning flags for defenders. Despite our…

Subtlety Is the Danger for Cybercrime Security Efforts

Celebrities who appear to be suddenly successful have long been called “overnight sensations.” In reality, most of these instant stars worked for years to perfect their skills before they got their big break. Cyberattacks often follow the same trajectory. They are not always immediately disruptive because they are executed stealthily over long periods of time….

InterContinental Hotels Investigating Possible Card Breach

British multinational hotel company InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has launched an investigation after being informed of a possible payment card breach at some of its properties in the United States. Investigative journalist Brian Krebs learned from his sources in the financial industry that a pattern of fraud had been observed on credit and debit cards…

Highly lucrative Ransomware as a Service attacks poised to accelerate in 2017

Ransomware can be likened to global warming. It’s been around for years, but it’s now becoming an epidemic which needs serious attention. According to a recent survey conducted by Osterman Research, nearly 50% of U.S. companies experienced a “ransomware incident” over the last year. Without taking into account the number of unreported ransomware incidents, the…

A closer look at a tech support screen locker

In this blog post, we are going to take a closer look at some of the code that the most predominant family of tech support screen lockers are currently using to frustrate their victims. This, which is dubbed VinCE because of the Program folder it creates for itself, is compiled in Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL),…

DDoS attacks via WordPress now come with encryption

Kaspersky Lab experts have noted an emerging trend – a growth in the number of attacks using encryption. Such attacks are highly effective due to the difficulty in identifying them amongst the overall flow of clean requests. Recently, the company encountered yet more evidence of this trend – an attack exploiting vulnerabilities in WordPress via…

Locky Variant Osiris Distributed via Excel Documents

The infamous Locky ransomware has once again switched to a new extension to append to encrypted files, but reverted to malicious Office documents for distribution, security researchers have discovered. The latest Locky variant is appending the .osiris extension to encrypted files, marking a switch from the Norse mythology to Egyptian mythology. The change comes only…

Top 4 global security threats businesses will face in 2017

While the political, social and economic implications are not fully clear, gigabit connectivity represents a significant overnight leap forward. This will enable the IoT and a new class of applications to emerge that will “exploit the combination of big data, GPS location, weather, personal-health monitoring devices, industrial production and much more. Connectivity is now so…