New Malware Variant Hits With Ransomware or Cryptomining

A long-known ransom Trojan has added new tactics and a new talent, according to research released by Kaspersky Labs. The Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Rakhni family has been around since 2013, but a new variant does a search of files on the victim’s system and decides whether to launch ransomware — or simply use the computer to mine cryptocurrency….

Cybercriminals will gravitate to criminal activity that maximizes their profit

McAfee released its McAfee Labs Threats Report: June 2018, examining the growth and trends of new malware, ransomware, and other threats in Q1 2018. McAfee Labs saw on average five new threat samples every second, including growth in cryptojacking and other cryptocurrency mining malware, and notable campaigns demonstrating a deliberate drive to technically improve upon…

Has paying the ransom become business as usual?

Radware released its 2018 Executive Application and Network Security Report. For the first time in the survey’s five-year history, a majority of executives (53%) reported paying a hacker’s ransom following a cyber attack. According to the report, 69% of executives said that their company faced a ransom attack in the past year, compared with only…

Organisations across the UK are still struggling with ransomware

A year after the WannaCry ransomware attack impacted an estimated 200,000 victims, new research has revealed that organizations across the UK are still struggling to deal with ransomware. Webroot surveyed over 400 IT decision makers at UK businesses and found that 45 percent of those surveyed had suffered a ransomware attack, with nearly a quarter (23 percent) actually paying the ransom….

March’s Top Cybersecurity News Stories: Responding to Attacks, Women in Security and a New Community for Security Pros

Despite Growing Threats, Many Organizations Still Unprepared The vast majority of organizations still lack a formal cybersecurity incident response plan (CSIRP) that’s applied consistently across the organization, according to a new report from the Ponemon Institute. Paradoxically, the institute’s third annual study on cyber resilience found that organizations feel much more positive about their readiness than they did last…

11 ways ransomware is evolving

Ransomware detection and recovery tools and techniques are getting better. Unfortunately, so are ransomware developers. They are making ransomware harder to find and encrypted files harder to recover. One advantage that security operations have had over ransomware is that it’s predictable. It works in a linear fashion, which gives security tools and teams an opportunity…

Like any threat, malware evolves: Discover new trends

Cofense released the 2018 Cofense Malware Review, detailing the trends that defined malware attacks in 2017 and the emerging trends for network defenders to prioritize in 2018. While a couple of high profile breaches stole the spotlight in 2017, Cofense’s global security team uncovered a number of less visible evolutions that dramatically changed the threat…

Thanatos Ransomware Makes Data Recovery Impossible

A newly discovered ransomware family is generating a different encryption key for each of the encrypted files but saves none of them, thus making data recovery impossible. Dubbed Thanatos, the malware was discovered by MalwareHunterTeam and already analyzed by several other security researchers. When encrypting files on a computer, the malware appends the .THANATOS extension…