Why We Need To Reinvent How We Catalogue Malware
One obvious trend: crimeware technologies that come with simple user consoles and functionality to create unique binaries at the click of a button. To understand how the bad guys have become so adept at producing the flood of uniquely hashed malware, we need to look at what our adversaries have been doing the past few…
Explained: Bayesian spam filtering
Bayesian spam filtering is based on Bayes rule, a statistical theorem that gives you the probability of an event. In Bayesian filtering it is used to give you the probability that a certain email is spam. Named after the statistician Rev. Thomas Bayes who provided an equation that basically allows new information to update the…
What happens if your thermostat is hacked? Researchers name the top 7 security threats
What happens if a bad actor turns off your heat in the middle of winter, then demands $1,000 to turn it back on? Or even holds a small city’s power for ransom? Those kinds of attacks were among the top threats that security experts worried about at the RSA security conference this week. While consumers…
Simulation Shows Threat of Ransomware Attacks on ICS
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated the potential impact of ransomware on industrial control systems (ICS) by simulating an attack aimed at a water treatment plant. David Formby, a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and his faculty advisor, Raheem Beyah, identified several commonly used programmable…
A look back at the Zyns iframer campaign
We often get asked about drive-by download attacks, how they work, and specifically about what sites people may have visited just prior to getting infected. This is an interesting aspect when tracking campaigns and what they lead to. Typically, one can divide the drive-by landscape into two categories: malvertising and compromised websites. The former involves legitimate websites…
Ransomware disrupts Washington DC’s CCTV system
About 70 percent of the cameras hooked up to the police’s closed-circuit TV (CCTV) system in Washington, D.C., were reportedly unable to record footage for several days before President Trump’s inauguration due to a ransomware attack. The attack affected 123 of the 187 network video recorders that form the city’s CCTV system, the Washington Post reported…
Enhancing Enterprise Security for Ransomware Detection
Ransomware is a profitable business model for cyber criminals with 2016 payments closed at the billon dollar mark. According to a recent survey by IBM, nearly 70% of executives hit by ransomware have paid to get their data back. Those survey results do not include smaller organizations and consumers who are also paying to get their data…
Satan RaaS Promises Large Gains With Zero Coding Needed
A newly discovered family of ransomware is being offered via the Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) business model, allowing cybercriminals to easily customize their own versions of the malware, researchers explain. Dubbed Satan, the new ransomware family was discovered by security researcher Xylitol and is available for any wannabe criminal, as the service only requires the creation of…
New Mac backdoor using antiquated code
The first Mac malware of 2017 was brought to my attention by an IT admin, who spotted some strange outgoing network traffic from a particular Mac. This led to the discovery of a piece of malware unlike anything I’ve seen before, which appears to have actually been in existence, undetected, for some time, and which seems to…
No more ransomware?
Ransomware was a billion dollar problem last year, and it’s getting worse. A new report from Cybersecurity Ventures details dozens of new ransomware attacks over the past 90 days. (Disclaimer: Steve Morgan is founder and CEO of Cybersecurity Ventures.) Organizations stricken by ransomware have been fighting back by providing security awareness training to their employees….